Rashomon Redux
by Peripatetical
Summary: The morning after the night before. Four mostly-reliable narrators, three hang-overs, two head traumas, and the Dagger of Aqu'abi.
1. Nate

Title: Rashomon Redux

Author: Peripatetical

Rating: T

Summary: The morning after the night before. Four mostly-reliable narrators, three hang-overs, two head traumas, and the Dagger of Aqu'abi.

Spoilers: Season Three

Disclaimer: Not mine. I'm just taking the Leverage crew out for some cheap fun. I'll get them back to Electric Entertainment and TNT in the morning.

Author's Note: I'm posting chapter by chapter as I proofread, but this one isn't a WIP. Unlike Family Collision. ;-)

Chapter 1: Nate

Bang. Thump. Thump. Thump. Clatter. BANG! Thump. Thump.

Nate eased into consciousness gradually. He was lying on something soft, something that felt like his own bed. So far, so good. His brain took a little longer to isolate and identify the noises he was hearing. The banging seemed to be coming from downstairs. Someone in his kitchen? That wasn't unusual. The refrigerator and cabinet space hadn't belonged to him in years. The persistent thumping, however, seemed to originate inside his skull. Hangover?

He opened his eyes. It was definitely daytime—sun streamed throughout his room, illuminating the stack of books on the bedside table and his small collection of pictures—but the brightness wasn't overly bothersome. Maybe that was a 'no' on the hangover, then. By the angle of the light peeking through the blinds and around the curtains, he guessed it was not quite noon. What the hell had happened last night?

Nate hauled himself upright and paused at the edge of his bed as he considered the question. The last thing he clearly remembered was locking up McRory's. He had volunteered to close the bar...why, again? An image of the Dagger of Aqu'abi shimmered into his mind, along with the memory of Sophie's voice covetously describing the prize:

"10th century, four perfect emeralds, six rubies, gold filigree..."

Ah, yes, the dagger. Fueled by more than a little alcohol and spurred on by a collective desire to rectify past failures, the team had impulsively declared war against the CEO of Baron Oil, the dagger's current owner. And just as impulsively, Nate had gone along for the ride. So what did it mean that he was now waking up safely at home but with a wicked headache and absolutely no memory of what happened after he left the bar in pursuit of his team?

There was only one way to find out. Nate moved about his bedroom, dressing haphazardly in the first t-shirt and pair of slacks that he could lay his hands on. He finger-combed his hair, and turned toward the spiral staircase that led downstairs to the rest of the condo. His face felt rough with stubble, but shaving could wait. His head still hurt—in the process of trying to flatten his unruly hair, he had discovered a large bruise on his right temporal bone. Hopefully the person or persons making a racket in his kitchen could explain. And even if they couldn't, coffee with Irish whiskey beckoned. If he were lucky, there might even be an ice-pack in the freezer. He buttoned an Oxford shirt over his t-shirt, stuffed his feet into moccasin slippers, and mentally steeled himself for any possible disasters he might encounter below.

The scene downstairs only bemused the mastermind further. Instead of mayhem, he found sleeping teammates. From the base of the staircase, Nate surveyed the open expanse of Leverage HQ. Parker was the only person actually up and about. She was the cause of the kitchen clatter, although it wasn't immediately clear to Nate how eating cereal could be heard an entire floor away. Parker's clothing didn't reveal anything about last night's job. She was seated at the end of the kitchen counter, dressed unremarkably in black leggings and a long-sleeved plaid shirt. Her hair was gathered loosely in a side ponytail, and there was no rigging in sight.

He checked the sleepers for clues. Sophie was stretched out on the couch beneath the window. She was turned away from the room, toward the back of the couch, and burrowed so completely under the green blanket that only the spill of wavy, dark hair across a pillow identified the sleeping figure as the grifter. The pillow, Nate noticed, was nicked from his bedroom and he wondered when she had obtained it. The shoes peeking out from beneath the couch were a pair of black leather flats. Without additional cues like wardrobe, jewelry or make-up—heck, even nail color might help—this footwear didn't tell him much. Either Sophie had been playing a low-key character last night, or else she had changed once they returned. She did tend to use the office—his apartment!—as additional closet space. Nate reminded his sluggish brain to focus. Moving on...

Hardison was also sleeping, although he didn't look as comfortable as Sophie. The tall young man was draped sideways over one of the square cushioned chairs that matched the couch. Two or three fleece airline blankets were spread over his form—Parker's work?—but the blankets couldn't quite cover the hacker's gangly limbs. His right knee was bent over an arm of the chair, while his left leg stuck out straight to the floor. He still had on his shoes. The hacker's head was tipped back at an awkward angle, and he was snoring softly. A laptop lay open nearby on the floor, its screensaver an infinite starfield, but there was no pile of orange soda bottles or candy wrappers to indicate that he had spent a significant portion of last night hacking from headquarters. Nate rubbed his forehead wearily as he turned in the direction of caffeine. Had they gone after the dagger, or hadn't they?

Nate passed Eliot on the way to the coffee maker. The hitter was slumped at the dining table, with his head resting on his folded arms. A bag of frozen peas was sandwiched between Eliot's brow and his forearm, answering Nate's question about the current availability of ice-packs, and Eliot's eyes were closed. Nate assumed the other man was sleeping, until he heard a muffled snarl from under the peas.

"Parker, if you don't stop that banging, I swear to God I will burn every single one of your cereal boxes. And I won't take out the hidden money before I light the match, neither."

"Shows what you know, Sparky," retorted the thief with cheerful unconcern. "After we got rid of the loan shark for Cora, I found new places for my emergency stash."

Parker continued to munch her cereal, but the metallic clanging ceased. Turning towards the cabinet for the whiskey to add to his coffee, Nate realized that Parker had been kicking a partially open drawer while she ate. The drawer's vibrations, along with the rattling of its contents, had been the source of the noise.

"I just want everyone to wake up," Parker complained, when she realized that she had been caught out. "We should be celebrating."

She looked from Eliot to Nate in expectant appeal. Both men stared blankly back at her. Nate wracked his brain to remember what it was that Parker thought they should celebrate. Was the dagger around here somewhere? Should he risk waking Sophie and Hardison by turning on the news?

Eliot just closed his eyes and laid his head back down.

"There's something wrong with you," he grumbled.


	2. Parker

Title: Rashomon Redux

Author: Peripatetical

Rating: T

Summary: The morning after the night before. Four mostly-reliable narrators, three hang-overs, two head traumas, and the Dagger of Aqu'abi.

Spoilers: Season Three

Disclaimer: Not mine. I'm just taking the Leverage crew out for some cheap fun. I'll get them back to Electric Entertainment and TNT in the morning.

Chapter 2: Parker

Nate checked the freezer and was gratified to see that the automatic ice-maker was industriously replenishing the ice supply. He tossed a couple handfuls of ice into a bowl, grabbed a tea towel from a drawer, and sat down at the kitchen counter with Parker. He wrapped some of the ice in the towel and gingerly held it to the goose egg he'd found earlier. He then reached for his coffee and took a fortifying gulp. Finally, he looked over at Parker.

"Since you're the only person who seems to be functioning this morning, could you please tell me what happened last night?"

Parker's gaze was fastened on his bowl of ice, and Nate thought he saw traces of guilt flitting about the edges of her expression. At his question, though, Parker sent a stare of surprise and curiosity his way.

"What do you mean, what happened, Nate? I mean, you were there." Her expression turned obstinate. "And I already apologized for the part that I screwed up. I don't see why I need another lecture."

Well, Nate thought, that cleared up absolutely nothing. His bruised skull gave a particularly vicious throb. He sipped his coffee and tried again.

"Let me be more specific, then. How did I get this bruise?"

Parker's attention shifted back to the bowl of ice. Yes, definitely some guilt there.

"You got hit by something heavy," she hedged. She shot him a quick sideways glance, but her overall focus remained on the ice. "You mean you don't remember the potatoes? I didn't think they hit you that hard." Parker paused, considering. "Although they did lay you out pretty effectively for vegetables...you smacked right against that butcher block table when you fell. Oh!" Her face lit with sudden comprehension, "The table did it, and the table was definitely not my fault." Having let herself off the hook to her own satisfaction, she finally made eye-contact with Nate.

"So if you can't remember the potatoes, what do you remember?"

Nate ignored the potato-shaped holes in her culpability analysis, and focused on the information. His kitchen held neither potatoes nor butcher block tables, so at some point last night, he had been in someone else's kitchen. Parker, too, unless she had managed to sock him with produce remotely. Considering this was Parker, he couldn't dismiss the possibility.

"I remember hashing out what really happened to the Dagger of Aqu'abi five years ago, I remember you and Sophie and Hardison taking off completely without plans or prep, and I remember locking up the bar behind you," he summarized.

"We didn't get far," groused Parker. "You and Eliot caught us before we we got the van out of the parking garage. Sophie took too long collecting her outfits."

"Just stealing the dagger wouldn't have hurt Hayton or Baron Oil...you would've known that if you'd given it any thought at all," Nate answered.

"Yeah, yeah. That's what you said when you stopped us," said Parker. Her voice took on a sing-song quality as she listed points Nate assumed he'd made the night before.

"If we just take the dagger, then Hayton gets the insurance payout. And the museum suffers from all the bad publicity over our theft. If we want to steal the dagger, then we need to do it in a way that will make Hayton suffer instead."

"Valid last night, valid today," agreed Nate. "So what happened?"

His skull pounded as he tried to prod Parker's narrative forward. Surely if he repeated the question enough times, she would answer it. Then again, wasn't that the definition of insanity, performing the same actions over and over in hopes of achieving different results? Nate poured more whiskey into his coffee, took a large swallow, and willed his head to become one with the ice. "Parker?"

"Fine." Parker shoved her empty cereal bowl away and the bowl and spoon clattered noisily across the countertop. Nate winced at the sharp sounds.

"But I can only tell you about the parts I was there for," she warned.

Nate nodded and lifted his hand, tiredly gesturing for her to continue.

"Like I said, you and Eliot caught us at the van. You called us 'idiots,' too. That wasn't nice," Parker began.

"Technically, Parker, he told us not to act like drunken idiots," Hardison corrected from across the room. The hacker was having trouble disentangling himself from the blankets, but eventually, he fought himself free and joined Parker and Nate in the kitchen. Nate thought he heard Hardison mumbling something like "rich, considering the source," but he ignored it, and watched Hardison navigate the room. The young man grabbed a coffee mug, but bypassed the coffee pot, going straight to the fridge for orange soda. Nate noticed that Hardison was moving stiffly. Was everyone injured?

Hardison sat down gingerly across from Nate. His mug sported a drawing of a DeLorean crashing into the TARDIS, with the caption 'It came out of nowhere!' and usually the sight of the cartoon made the hacker smile. Today, he was grim, intent only on not spilling his soda as he poured. Once he had his drink in hand, he turned bleary eyes to Parker.

"You happy, Parker? You got two people now way more awake than we should be. Banging bowls around? Was that really necessary?"

Parker just shrugged. "It worked, didn't it? And Nate doesn't remember anything, so he's probably glad you're up."

"Wait, what?" Hardison looked across at Nate. "You don't remember anything?"

"I'm told it has something to do with potatoes," Nate said wryly. The mastermind sat up straighter on his stool and held up his towel-wrapped ice in illustration. "There's actually ice if you need some. Eliot opted for peas."

"Naw, man. Bruises are not my problem. My problem is thinking it's ever a good idea to drink with you and Parker...you're you, and as far as I can tell, she's freakin' immune to alcohol. You know, we could pick other activities for our team bonding sessions...there's movies and bowling...I hear whale watching is nice," Hardison answered. He nodded at the rest of the team. "At least Eliot and Sophie are sharing the pain this morning."

Apparently, Eliot had been following the kitchen conversation, because Hardison's final comment set him in motion. The hitter got up from his seat and tossed the bag of peas down on the table. "I got whacked on the forehead with a cricket bat, Hardison. I'm not hung over." With that, he stalked out of the main living area toward the downstairs bathroom.

Parker snickered. "He is too hung over. Before he got the peas out of the freezer, he drank two bottles of water and I think he even took aspirin."

Nate looked over at Sophie, who was still sleeping soundly on the couch. "Sophie almost never drinks as much as she appears to," he mused. "She didn't get hit with potatoes, did she?"

Hardison snorted. "I wouldn't know. You two went off together on some super secret mission you didn't feel like explaining at the time." He narrowed his eyes at Nate. "So, how's it feel to be the one in the dark, huh?"

Nate didn't answer. He stood up and slowly scanned the room. Bingo! There was an aspirin bottle on top of a flannel shirt that Eliot had left in a heap on one of the chairs. Nate scooped up the painkillers and then snagged Eliot's peas; condensation and melt water were threatening the tabletop's finish. He used Eliot's shirt to wipe up the puddle and deliberately dropped the shirt back on the chair the way he'd found it. It would serve Eliot right if he had to wear the cold, damp piece of clothing. Was it really so hard to put things away? Nate returned to the kitchen, and tossed the peas into the freezer. Swallowing two aspirin tablets, he pushed the pill bottle toward Hardison, who was staring morosely into the depths of his orange soda. Nate sat back down at the counter and reapplied the ice to his head. He felt a little better. He didn't know whether he should thank the ice, the caffeinated whiskey, or the knowledge that there was now aspirin in his system, but he'd take it.

"OK, Parker, talk. What happened? Preferably after 'drunken idiots' and before Sophie and I went off somewhere."

"The plan wasn't complicated. We didn't have any background info yet on Hayton. Your idea was to frame him for doing what Gladstone used to do—we were going to make it look like Hayton had sold the dagger and was exhibiting a fake."

Nate thought about it for a moment. "So was the plan to steal the dagger and just plant evidence that it had been fake, or steal the dagger, plant evidence, and actually put a fake dagger on display?"

Parker fished an ice cube out of Nate's bowl and started drawing water designs on the counter top.

"Originally, I was supposed to go in and just take the dagger, since we didn't have anything to replace it with. You told us you broke Gladstone's old copy, and we don't know what happened to it later, anyway. It was supposed to look like Hayton orchestrated the theft so that he could get the insurance payout, straight out of Gladstone's playbook. But the museum shop had really nice souvenir replicas, just sitting there unprotected..."

"Whoa, Parker...too much skipping ahead. Given the first plan, what? You, Hardison, and Eliot took the van to case the museum, and Sophie and I went someplace else?" asked Nate.

"No," answered the thief. "We all went to the museum. Sophie rode with us in the van, and you followed behind with a car. I don't know where you parked it—you were on foot when you met us. Eliot parked the van between the museum and the fens."

Nate wondered if his car had made it home with him, or if he'd have to get Hardison to fix multiple parking tickets. Between Boston PD and all the security belonging to the colleges and hospitals along Huntington Ave, no vehicle overstaying its welcome was ever overlooked. He decided he'd worry about the car later and zeroed in on a strange detail in Parker's story.

"What was Sophie doing riding in the van?" Nate didn't have to explain his question. They all knew Sophie thought the van smelled.

Parker wiped out half of her water doodles with her shirtsleeve and started over. A van took shape where random spirals and dots had been before. "Her job. She and Hardison were looking at something on his laptop. I don't know what—Eliot and I were in the front of the van listing everything we knew about the guard rotations and each of the museum entrances."

Hardison came out of his daze to offer up a bit of information. "You had Sophie working on framing Hayton. This stop in Boston was just one point on a world tour. The dagger's been on display all over the place during the last year...some sort of alternative hearts and minds ad campaign for Baron Oil—building name recognition, associating the company with arts patronage, that kind of thing. I was pulling as much info as possible on Hayton and the exhibition timeline for her while we drove."

"At 2 AM, the museum is only a five minute drive from here. Eight, tops." argued Nate. "That's not enough time for research."

"Yeah, but it takes 20 minutes to search for a workable parking space once you get there," Hardison said. "Plus, you said you had to check on something."

At Nate's raised eyebrow, Hardison raised his hands in innocence. "That's a direct quote, man...I'm not the one withholding information. But see how annoying it is?" He poured more soda and went back to watching CO2 bubbles rise to the surface.

"OK, let me get this straight," said Nate. "Eliot and Parker's job was to get into the museum and get the dagger. Hardison, you were monitoring security communications and hacking the alarm system from the van. I went to check on something. And Sophie was using her knowledge of the European art world to select a plausible point in time for Hayton to have sold the dagger?"

"Gee, you catch on fast," agreed Parker. "It's almost like you were the one to come up with the plan in the first place."

"Funny," said Nate. "I may not remember the plan, but I'm pretty certain that potatoes weren't part of it."

"Eh, you work with what you've got," she answered. Abruptly, she slid off of her stool and crossed the kitchen. Nate watched in bemusement as she began making tea. After putting water on to boil, Parker measured loose tea into Sophie's ceramic tea pot, and set out three large mugs and the sugar bowl. Next, she dug around in the refrigerator for about thirty seconds, finally coming up with a lemon. Leaving the lemon next to the mugs, she sat back down with Nate and Hardison, only then realizing that she was the subject of Nate's scrutiny.

"What?" she demanded. "You've got coffee. Hardison's got orange soda. I want tea. Besides, when Eliot gets out of the shower, he'll drink some. And Sophie, too, when she wakes up."

Hardison nodded in mock agreement. "Sure, Sophie will wake up soon. Especially since the whistle on that tea kettle is loud enough to wake the dead."

Parker stilled, and her hands clenched into fists. "She's not dead," was her only answer.

Nate rolled his eyes. "Can we get back to the dagger?" The ice in his tea towel had melted past the towel's ability to absorb it, and he now had very cold water trickling down his neck. He leaned over and pulled another towel out of the drawer as Parker re-started her story.

"Last night, there was no exhibit party that we could crash, and the dagger isn't due to be shipped to its next destination until Wednesday. Strategically, we probably should have waited, but it's a good thing we didn't. L—"

"Wait, why's that?" interrupted Nate.

"Can't tell you." Parker said primly. "You told me not to skip ahead."

A bark of laughter followed by a groan erupted from Hardison. "Damn, girl, please don't make me laugh," he complained. "It hurts." Hardison closed his eyes and leaned forward, cradling his head in his hands. Parker reached out and gently brushed her hand across his close-cropped hair.

"Sorry. But he did tell me."

"Yeah, I know," the hacker murmured. "Nate, what she means is that we weren't the only ones going after the dagger last night."

Nate felt a new headache coming on, this one beginning behind his eyes as he watched the interplay between the two youngest team members. If presented with this scenario as a hypothetical, he would have put money on Parker either ignoring Hardison's pain as irrelevant or else slapping him on the head like a player in Duck-Duck-Goose. Instead, her response was almost...intimate. Nate massaged the bridge of his nose and wondered if he had put in enough penance yet with Sophie for her to clue him in, or if she'd just smile like the Sphinx and tell him it was none of his business. The grifter was still sleeping; he estimated that she had five minutes of snooze time left before the tea kettle blasted her awake.

"You're right, Parker, I did." admitted Nate with a sigh. "What did you and Eliot decide about the best point of entry?"

"There wasn't an exhibit gala, but it was Second Friday—you know, the after-hours singles thing the museum puts on once a month, so we lucked out. The cleaning crew was still cleaning up, and they had a fire exit propped open in one of the stairwells."

Nate did know. Second Fridays at the Boston Museum of Art & Antiquities made his skin itch. It was where Sophie had met that boyfriend of hers back along. And Hardison and Parker were regulars. They liked the free hors d'oeuvres and claimed they were "keeping their hand in," a statement which was entirely too vague for comfort. Nate was almost positive that nothing had ever gone missing from the museum during their forays, but each time he worried that some artifact or alarm system feature would prove irresistible. This time, however, Second Friday was indeed lucky. How annoying.

"Did you go in as cleaning crew?" he asked.

Parker shrugged. "We've got the right uniforms for it. It wasn't a perfect cover—the dagger's display case is in a gallery pretty far from the main atrium where all the party mess was, but it let us blend in a bit. We got through the door, easy-peasy."

"Had Sophie and I already left by then?" asked Nate.

"Oh, yeah. Right after Eliot found the propped door. You whispered something to Sophie and she looked at you like you were nuts. Then she ducked into the van, and came out looking like a librarian, and off you two went."

"In what direction?"

Rubbing his eyes and sitting up a little, Hardison fielded the question. "North. We had the van near the southwest corner of the museum complex." A sly smile crossed his face.

"For all we know, y'all just ditched us in search of a storage closet. You weren't halfway up the block before you were holding hands."

Great. What a perfect time for his memory to become Swiss cheese. Hardison was teasing, not bluffing, which meant that at some time last night, Nate and the incomparable Sophie Devereaux had strolled down a nighttime sidewalk pretending to be a couple out on the town. It was frustrating enough to not remember a job. To not remember an affectionate Sophie, as well? That was cosmically unfair. Kissing the woman was a mind-bending experience, but such a rarity that sometimes he felt he had dreamed it. Flirting with her during a con was the next best thing. And where the hell had he and Sophie gone? They hadn't set out to distract guards, not with Soph intentionally dressed down, and besides, Parker would have mentioned something like that. Nate was getting a very bad feeling about this 'super secret mission.'

The mastermind could think of only one plausible target who might be useful if Nate Ford appeared on the doorstep with a bookish, dowdy Sophie in tow, and nothing Parker or Hardison had said even hinted at that person's participation. This whole job, whatever it was, had gone down during the wee hours of a Saturday morning, for God's sake. His memory had better return. There might be more damage control needed than just a few parking tickets.

Nate surfaced from his musings to see Parker and Hardison still smirking at him. The whites of the hacker's eyes looked dull and grayish, instead of contrasting brightly against his dark skin—one more sign of the man's exhaustion—but teasing Nate seemed to have made him a little more chipper.

"So glad my injury-induced memory loss is helping to cheer you up this morning," said Nate sourly. "Storage closets aside, what happened in the museum?"

"Nothing good," admitted Parker. She looked disgruntled. Nate wondered if her story was nearing the twist that had earned her a lecture. He sipped his coffee and waited.

"It should have been simple. With Eliot in the museum and Hardison's tech as additional eyes, guard rotations weren't a threat. And the dagger's display case isn't anything at all like the one for the two Davids. This case just has a lock in its column base that's tied into the museum's security system. As long as the system thinks an authorized person is doing the locking and unlocking, then it doesn't care whether the case is full or empty."

"There are a lot of advantages to pulling a job on home turf," agreed Hardison. "The museum doesn't realize it, but they have double the electronic surveillance and security measures than what they installed themselves. After Stark's little visit last year, we decided to keep an eye on the higher-profile museums and galleries around town."

Parker nodded excitedly. "Hardison made me a new ID—Isabella Morris. With that first name, I can walk right into the Gardner for free whenever I want." She frowned. "They really don't like it when someone tries to scale the courtyard, though."

"Seriously?" Nate chided.

"It wasn't during the spring when all the flowers are blooming," defended the thief.

"Focus!" demanded Hardison, drawing out the word. He was now half-way though the two-liter at his elbow. "Those cameras you placed are still transmitting and the security guards at the Gardner think that it was an MIT hack gone wrong. You did good, it worked out, and Isabella Morris didn't get banned—Sophie still takes you there for for hoity-toity brunch. Now, please, back to the dagger, or else I am going home and going to sleep."

"Brunch there is like a tea party," Parker reflected thoughtfully. Tabling her digression, she easily picked up where she had left off. "I went through the ventilation system to get to the gallery where the dagger was. Hardison spoofed the museum's cameras and shut off the motion detectors so that I could cross the room in the open. I was examining the locking mechanism when Eliot came on over comms—he said that two guards were headed my way."

Her watery van had long since dried on the counter top. Parker reached forward and dipped her finger in the bowl of mostly-melted ice. She drew a large rectangle representing the gallery. In the upper left corner, she added a crescent-shape for the dagger and a little stick-figure Parker.

"Hardison checked the cameras; the guards were going to enter the gallery near my vent." Parker drew an arrow that crossed into the rectangle at the bottom right corner.

"I couldn't get back across the room in time, so I left through the gallery door nearest the dagger, here." She drew an arrow leading out of the rectangle to the left.

"A door which happened to lead directly into the hallway with the gift shop," said Hardison with gloomy resignation.

"The gift shop with the really nice dagger souvenirs?" guessed Nate.

"That would be the one," responded the hacker. He swirled his soda around in his mug, moodily watching the orange waves.

"Oh, stop it. It's not my fault that I lost the dagger, Hardison!" protested Parker.

"You lost the dagger?" exclaimed the mastermind. "You haven't even told me how you got it in the first place!"

Parker ignored Nate. Her whole body was turned on her stool to face Hardison. She opened her mouth to continue her argument when the tea kettle let loose an ear-shattering shriek. Hardison immediately put his head down on the counter and covered his ears.

"Please make it stop," he begged.

Across the room, Sophie sat bolt upright and promptly slipped off the couch, still trapped in her green blanket cocoon. Over the whistle of the tea kettle, Nate could make out some truly creative cursing. The initial mixture of French and English was standard Sophie, but as she continued, he thought he heard a few Chinese expressions in there as well. And was that last bit Farsi? He smiled and turned to the blond woman next to him. The sudden assault of sound seemed to have frozen her in place.

"Parker, water's ready." He drained his coffee cup and got up for a refill. "You better hope she doesn't make it to Russian," he added helpfully.


	3. Hardison

Title: Rashomon Redux

Author: Peripatetical

Rating: T

Summary: The morning after the night before. Four mostly-reliable narrators, three hang-overs, two head traumas, and the Dagger of Aqu'abi.

Spoilers: Season Three

Disclaimer: Not mine. I'm just taking the Leverage crew out for some cheap fun. I'll get them back to Electric Entertainment and TNT in the morning.

Author's Note: Hardison's mug in the previous chapter is actually a Woot! t-shirt designed by Aled Lewis. Go see it on the Reckoning at shirt(dot)woot(dot)com...you know you want one! Also, I borrowed Second Fridays from the MIT Museum, but you really can get into the Gardner Museum for free if your first name is Isabella.

Chapter 3: Hardison

At Nate's words, Parker sprang into action. She turned off the stove and yanked the tea kettle from its burner. The kettle's shrill whistle subsided to a burbling hiss. Once Parker poured most of the hot water into the blue and white teapot, the kettle was silent all together.

Hardison cautiously lifted his head. "Is it over?" he whispered.

Nate looked up from splashing whiskey into his fresh cup of coffee. "I think your ears are safe for now," he assured his hung-over teammate.

The silencing of the tea kettle calmed Sophie down also. Nate reclaimed his seat at the kitchen counter, but his eyes stayed on the grifter as she clumsily unwrapped herself from the blanket and climbed to her feet. She was muttering angrily—Nate thought she had worked herself up to Turkish, but he didn't catch any Russian imprecations or threats mixed in, so he figured Parker was safe, too.

The grifter was wearing her salmon-colored silk robe, one that Nate recalled from his flying trip to London the year before. He liked that robe. Not for its appearance particularly—unlike the majority of Sophie's clothing, this piece didn't complement her coloring at all. The profiler in Nate constructed several meanings from this aberration: he suspected that she wore the robe because it was comfortable and she thought the material was pretty. Perhaps it had some sentimental value attached. It wasn't something she'd wear to seduce a man, although Nate had a more than a couple of fantasies that started with getting her out of it. Mostly, he appreciated the robe because she had brought it with her when she returned to Boston. To him, it was a sign that she had come home.

As Sophie approached the kitchen, Nate could see that she was barefoot. Her toes were painted red, and navy blue pajama pants hid her legs below the hem of the robe. Above the robe's neckline, the collar of a white dress shirt peeked out. So, she had stolen more than a pillow from his room last night. Nate took a breath, preparing to needle her about the petty thefts, only to shut his mouth in surprise as she started in on him first.

"Are you responsible for that alarm clock from hell? Huh?" she demanded. Hardison ducked and covered his ears again.

Nate raised both hands in a surrender motion and shook his head, no. It wasn't her words that robbed him of speech, but her delivery. After cursing fluently though several languages and dialects, she had returned to English. But this English was distinctly American. More specifically, it was third-generation-North-End-of-Boston American. This accent had stormed Boston PD. Twice.

"Good morning to you, too, Viola," Nate ventured. Sophie didn't comment. She rounded the counter and brushed by him on her way to the coffee pot. Nate, Hardison, and Parker all watched her curiously. Her first stop after pouring coffee was the liquor cabinet. It was strange enough for Sophie to pass up freshly brewed tea. They had never seen her spike her coffee.

The grifter huffed in annoyance when she had to shift bottles around to get at her goal. Finally, she straightened, and Nate's eyebrows rose as she poured a full shot of vodka into the coffee. The addition raised the liquid level in the mug so high that she had to sip it down before she could take another step. Lifting her eyes from the rim of the coffee cup, she realized that she was the center of attention.

"What are you all looking at?" she asked belligerently. No one volunteered an answer, and for five long seconds that seemed to stretch into infinity, everyone just stared. The standoff was broken by Eliot striding into the kitchen.

"I heard the tea kettle," he said. The hitter's hair was tied back and still wet, and the smell of soap wafted with him. He eyed Sophie, taking in her coffee and her stance in front of the open liquor cabinet.

"What's with her?" he asked the room at large. Nate and Hardison just shook their heads.

"Woke up weird," offered Parker. "Nate, too, but you already knew that. Hardison's about to tell him about the gift shop."

Eliot nodded. He crossed to the dining table and picked up his abandoned shirt. From the man's reaction, Nate guessed that the shirt was still slightly wet. Eliot examined the shirt with mild confusion, sniffed it, and dropped it back on the chair, preferring to make due with a single layer, rather than put the damp flannel over the Henley he was already wearing.

Hardison's eyes tracked Eliot as the hitter made his way to the kitchen counter. The younger man seemed to be waiting for everyone to settle before picking up the tale. Sophie wasn't helping—she prowled aimlessly about the kitchen, scrutinizing the rest of them as if they were the stars of an exotic nature documentary.

Eliot scooped up the lemon by the mugs, tossing it idly as he checked on the tea. Satisfied, he grabbed a paring knife and efficiently sliced the fruit into wedges. He moved the cutting board with the lemon wedges closer to the tea pot, and poured two mugs of tea. Passing one of the mugs to Parker and keeping the other for himself, he sat down next to Nate.

"Well?" he asked Hardison. "How far into the fiasco have you gotten?" Immediately, Parker jumped in.

"It was a good idea!" she argued. Nate thought they were still talking about the gift shop, but he wasn't sure.

"He had a knife, Parker," Eliot answered reprovingly, "and I couldn't get to you."

"A knife? Who had a knife? And where were you?" Nate suddenly had so many questions, he didn't know whom to look at first. And it was unnerving having a strangely-behaving Sophie at his back, drifting in and out of his peripheral vision.

"People, hold up," interrupted Hardison. "Nate, you were off comms. Eliot, Parker's idea to borrow the souvenir wasn't a bad one—it would've bought us some time to frame Hayton. But _you_ have to admit," he turned and faced Parker as he continued, "we weren't prepared for either the gift shop or the man with the knife."

Parker capitulated, although her expression indicated she was holding back several arguments. "Fine. Whatever. Tell it your way." She picked up some lemon wedges and began mangling them as she squeezed juice into her tea.

"Thank you," breathed the hacker. He drank some more soda and rolled his shoulders. He inhaled, as if to begin, and then changed his mind.

"You know what? I won't just tell you, I'll show you. Hang on, I'll put the surveillance video up on the big screens." Hardison pushed himself away from the counter and headed toward the chair where he'd slept. He dragged the upholstered chair into the briefing area and then went back for his laptop, tapping on the keyboard even as he picked it up off the floor. The wall-mounted flat screens flared to life and briefly showed cascading file folders before resolving into the familiar vantage points of security cameras.

Hardison sank down onto the chair and gestured with his left hand, which was holding the small remote.

"These are files from last night. See, there's the atrium, with the cleaning crew." The grainy footage showed 10-15 people wearing uniforms busily breaking down tables and filling trash barrels.

Nate, Eliot, and Parker had followed Hardison into the briefing area and were now perched at the table that faced the screens. The tableau looked more like the beginning of a job than the end of one. Sophie, however, kept herself separate; she lounged against the spiral staircase, cradling her coffee cup and looking bored.

"There's Eliot," said Parker, pointing toward the bottom right quadrant of the scene. The hitter, recognizable by his bulk and the pony tail sticking out from under his cap, appeared to stumble and drop his end of a table. The footage was silent, but the table's impact with the stone floor must have been loud, because almost every other figure on camera flinched and turned in Eliot's direction.

"And there goes Parker, into the vents" narrated Hardison. On screen, the slim figure of the thief disappeared around a corner, taking advantage of Eliot's noisy distraction. Hardison fast-forwarded through several minutes of footage. When two museum guards entered the atrium, he slowed the playback speed to normal.

"These are the guards that Eliot warned us about," he continued. "See, there they go towards the gallery with the dagger." Hardison sped up the footage again, briefly, and then paused the action, "And there goes the guy with the knife." On screen, one member of the cleaning crew was frozen mid-stride, clearly breaking away from the group and heading toward a doorway opposite the exit taken by Parker and the guards.

"How'd you miss him the first time?" asked Nate.

"The door he left through? That's the direction for the bathrooms," answered Eliot. "He blended in with the rest of the cleaning team, better than me and Parker, really. His footwear wasn't suspicious, and I gotta tell you, he was not wearing a knife holster anywhere under his uniform. I would have noticed."

There was a sharp click as Eliot reached under the table and took out his frustration on the light switch. The briefing table went dark, and the hitter's shoulders relaxed slightly at the loss of brightness.

"Much as I hate to admit that Eliot has x-ray vision, he's right," said Hardison. With a wave of the remote, he opened a new window of security footage. This window showed an area of hallway, empty except for a marble bust atop a column. The new picture was also in black and white, but it had better resolution than the atrium shots. The mystery man in the janitorial uniform entered the frame, and knelt next to the bust. Hardison zoomed in on the man's target, a small rectangular air vent about six inches off the floor.

"After things calmed down, I went back and tracked him. He avoided the museum's cameras, but he didn't know about ours. He took the long way around to reach the dagger, and before he entered the gallery, he saw Parker in the hallway with the replica. That's when he doubled back and picked up the knife stashed in the wall."

"When he saw me with a dagger, he assumed that I had beaten him to it," sniffed Parker disapprovingly. "Very sloppy—he didn't even bother to check the display case."

"And absolutely no eye for authenticity, either," offered a French-accented voice behind them. "I could see that the gems in the replicas were fake from 10 meters away."

Nate, Eliot, and Parker swung around in their chairs to gape at Sophie.

"What?" asked the grifter. "I admit that the young man's copies were much better." She shrugged her shoulders elegantly and waved her coffee cup at Hardison as she spoke. Nate tried to recall the circumstances under which he had last heard these tones—precision and condescension and impatience all rolled together. He somehow knew that if she were speaking in French, her accent would be southern—Meridional, not standard Metropolitan French—but that wasn't enough for his memory to put a name to this character. With the conundrum simmering in his brain, Nate tried to keep her talking.

"Weren't you fooled by Gladstone's fake five years ago?" he queried.

Too late. He'd lost her attention. With a toss of her hair, Sophie abruptly switched personae again. She blinked, cocked her head to the side, and glared at each member of the team in turn, eventually returning to Nate. Viola D'Agostino's indolent slouch was back. So was her confrontational attitude.

"Your taste in movies is terrible," she accused, nodding at the flat-screens. "This is even more boring than our date last night."

Hardison grinned, and Eliot and Parker snickered openly at Nate's chagrin. Sophie didn't wait for the mastermind to formulate a response. With a swirl of her robe, she swiftly placed her empty coffee cup on the dining table, and climbed the spiral staircase to the loft upstairs.

"Are you sure she didn't get hit with anything last night?" Nate asked again.

"Not unless something happened to her during your _date_," answered Eliot with a smirk.

"Maybe she hit her head when she fell off the couch," suggested Hardison. They all looked over at the couch. The pillow and blanket lay on the floor where Sophie had dropped them. There were no pieces of furniture or other hard corners anywhere near. Parker's expression turned gleeful.

"It's like the Wheel of Fortune!" she enthused. "Round and round and round she goes. Where she stops, nobody knows!" Parker twirled once in her chair, as if to illustrate her point. "Do you think she'll do requests?" she added hopefully.

With one last worried glance up the staircase, Nate shook his head. He could hear water being turned on.

"Maybe she'll be more clear-headed after a shower." The familiarity of Sophie's French accent was still bugging him, but he returned his attention to the bank of screens and the still image of the man retrieving a knife.

"If this guy was showing up on your cameras, Hardison, how come you missed him the first time?" pressed Nate. Could he prize answers out of anyone today?

"Hey, man, I had one eye on the guards, because those two I just showed you on screen weren't keeping their usual schedule, but otherwise, I was just a little busy with gift shop security," defended Hardison.

"Those souvenirs weren't as 'unprotected' as Parker claims. Sure, they were out on open shelves, but the museum is serious about catching shop-lifters—there are cameras everywhere in there—and the surveillance inside the shop is completely separate from the security system protecting the art. We've got a back door into the system that monitors the galleries, but we never bothered with the gift shop."

"OK, OK," said Nate. "I get it. There were a lot of cameras. Just show me what happened."

Hardison aimed the remote and pressed a button. The mystery man kneeling near the air vent vanished, and security footage of Parker took his place. This footage was silent as well. The thief was standing in front of two wide glass doors, working the lock at the center. Displays of merchandise were dimly visible through more glass on either side of the doorway. To the left, Nate could see early 20th century posters for the Olympics arranged around an ad for an exhibit called 'The Art of Sport' and the right side was devoted to souvenirs stamped with famous Impressionist paintings. Did the world need toothbrushes decorated with Monet's Water Lilies?

The team watched as Parker triumphed over the lock and checked her watch. She didn't seem either pleased or displeased with her time, simply shrugging and pocketing her tools. Then, she did something truly surprising—instead of opening the door, her hand paused mid-reach and she stood perfectly still. The hacker answered Nate's unspoken question.

"Now what y'all can't hear is me yelling over the earbuds for her to give me time to turn off the door alarm before she goes busting in there," he explained.

"It wasn't a complicated alarm. I could have clipped it from the doorway," muttered Parker.

"But then we would've had to go back and fix it, mama" Hardison answered gently. "It was cleaner this way."

"Wait, she's right in front of a glass wall," Eliot said. "If there are so many cameras inside the gift shop, then some of them are aimed at the door. Why aren't guards swarming up from the control room?"

"See how you can see the merchandise inside the shop from out in the hallway?" Hardison asked. "The nighttime security lights are brighter in there. It's like seeing into people's living rooms at night from out on the sidewalk. The gift shop cameras can't see her until she gets inside." He paused and took a swig from his soda bottle.

"At least, that was my theory when all this was actually happening," he admitted. Before Nate could quiz Hardison on this last statement, the hacker directed their attention back to the screen.

"Look, now she's in." They watched as Parker walked toward one of the souvenir daggers, this one prominently displayed on top of a glass counter that doubled as a jewelry showcase and check-out register. Before she reached the souvenir, however, she veered to the right and stopped in front of a wooden door. The door was inconspicuously located along the side wall of the gift shop, between a rack of calendars and a stack of wire cubes holding t-shirts. As Parker made short work of this second door lock, Nate wondered if she had decided to steal a dagger from the stockroom.

The security footage didn't follow the thief into the back room, so Hardison filled in the gap as they waited for Parker to reappear on screen.

"The computer system that runs the gift shop security is in that room," he explained. "Parker's getting me direct access."

Parker chimed in. "That room turned out to be computers AND storage," she said. "There were more daggers in there so I took one of those."

Just as she finished speaking, her on-screen counterpart re-entered the gift shop from the back room. The team could see that she was carrying a souvenir dagger. The thief stopped for a moment, hefting the toy in front of her as if testing its balance. She then tucked the dagger into her belt, briskly walked to the glass doors, and slipped out into the hallway. She locked the door behind her and turned right, away from the entrance to the gallery where the real dagger was kept, and disappeared from the camera's view.

Nate's brow furrowed. Parker was going the wrong way, and out in the hallway, her dark clothing and blond braid were clearly visible to the gift shop cameras. As if sensing that Nate was about to launch into more questions, Hardison hastily resumed his narration.

"Now, you saw when she was waving the fake dagger around a little bit? Those souvenirs look nice from far away—or through glass in a dimly lit gift shop," he shot a pointed glare at Parker, "but it turns out they're totally light weight. At least Gladstone's fake was kinda convincing to hold."

Eliot coughed, "Like you'd know" and sat back to see if the hacker would rise to the bait.

Nate noticed that while Eliot was recovering, Hardison was still in pain. Instead of reflexively jumping into a verbal brawl with the hitter, the younger man scotched the exchange with a repressive "Back at ya, man" and continued on.

"Gladstone's fake, _so I've heard, _was convincing to hold, but these—not so much. Parker was bringing the toy dagger back to the van; we were going to fix it up a little before she made the switch."

"That's probably what convinced the guy with a knife that she had the real thing," grumbled Eliot, shifting back into analysis-mode. "She was heading toward an exit, away from the gallery."

"Well, he was convinced alright. And Parker only convinced him further." Hardison's face was grim, his mouth a tight line, as he flicked the remote. More hallway footage appeared on screen. At first, Parker was the only figure visible. She was heading purposefully in the direction of the atrium. Some sound caught her attention, though, because she pivoted in a sharp about-face and stopped, her posture tense and wary.

The team didn't have to wait long. The cleaning-crew imposter entered the scene from the left, brandishing his knife. The thug was stocky and had light-colored skin—that was all Nate could tell from the footage. The man's hat obscured much of his face from the camera's view. Still, even without clear facial expressions or sound, it was evident that Parker was playing a game of chicken.

The thug gestured toward the dagger at her waist. He must have said something as well, because Parker responded by placing her left hand protectively in front of the dagger and shaking her head in the negative. The man took an experimental step forward and she stepped back. She then began side-stepping slowly in an arc, keeping a careful five feet between her and the knife. The man turned with her, mirroring her movements. He was still talking and he punctuated his words with slight jabs of his knife. He was growing progressively more agitated and didn't seem to notice or care that Parker had reversed their positions by 180 degrees. She was now on the left of the screen, facing toward the atrium, and the thug was on the right. Even though Eliot had scolded Parker earlier for engaging an armed man without ready back-up, Nate half-expected the hitter to come charging down the hallway and take down the threat.

It didn't happen. Instead, the thug stopped his monologue and lunged at Parker. She was prepared for his move—faster than the frame-speed of the camera, she struck and suddenly the knife was skittering along the floor. The thug froze for the briefest instant—Nate could imagine him deciding between the fight and his mission. The mission won. He snatched the dagger out of Parker's belt with his left hand and took off running in the direction of the exit.

Alone in the hallway once again, Parker pulled a dark cloth from somewhere on her person and made her way over to the abandoned knife. Careful to preserve prints, she wrapped the knife in the cloth and tucked it into a pocket of her uniform. As she raised one hand to her ear, a sign that she was talking to one or more of the Leverage teammates over comms, Hardison stopped the play-back.

"There's not much more to see," he explained. "Parker went back into the gift shop to get a new fake dagger and then she came out to the van. Eliot followed the goon who took the dagger from her."

At the mention of his name, the hitter turned an exasperated face to Parker. "You shoulda just given him the fake, Parker. Cowered a little—he would've bought the act."

Parker shook her head. "I had to do what I did," she insisted. "The souvenir was so light, I couldn't just hand it over. He had to believe that I was protecting something valuable and that he was taking it from me by force." Parker took a sip of her tea and then added brightly, "Besides, keep-away worked. I know you can't rush a guy with a knife. A gun, sure, but not a knife. "

"I am too young for gray hairs," Hardison complained to no one in particular.

Nate turned to Eliot. "Again, where were you when all this happened?"

"Stand down, man. I could ask you the same thing, except it's pretty clear you don't know," said Eliot. Still, he answered the question. "While Parker was in the gift shop, I was half a floor down in the north wing. I had gone to check out those two security guards. There was something off about them."

"Something off, you mean other than the fact that they weren't following the regular schedule?" asked Hardison. The hacker had sunk back down into his chair. His soda bottle was empty, and the energy that had sustained him while he was running footage on the flat-screens was gone.

Eliot nodded. "Their watches. The style of watch they were wearing said former IRA, not security guard from East Boston."

"Watches?" said Hardison, "Really?" It occurred to Nate that the hacker wasn't actually surprised by Eliot's reasoning, but merely making comments in order to stay awake.

Before the hitter could explain just how very distinctive IRA members' watches were, Nate jumped in with more questions. "What were IRA-trained fighters doing posing as museum guards? And where were the real guards?"

"I don't know where the real guards were," said Parker. "But I know why other people were after the dagger. Knife-guy told me."

Quick glances at Eliot and Hardison confirmed that Parker's revelation wasn't new to them. Nate realized that they had heard the whole exchange over the earbuds as it happened. From up in the loft, he heard a hair dryer turn on. He wondered if he and Sophie had been audio witnesses to the knife-fight, as well, wherever they had been.

"What did he tell you, Parker?" Nate asked.

Parker thought for a moment, as if playing back the scene in her mind. "He said a lot. Mostly swear words and threats. But the important part was that he didn't care how many fakes the British bastard had sold to other people—his boss had paid a fair price for the dagger and he was going to get it for him."


	4. Eliot

Title: Rashomon Redux

Author: Peripatetical

Rating: T

Summary: The morning after the night before. Four mostly-reliable narrators, three hang-overs, two head traumas, and the Dagger of Aqu'abi.

Spoilers: Season Three

Disclaimer: Not mine. I'm just taking the Leverage crew out for some cheap fun. I'll get them back to Electric Entertainment and TNT in the morning.

Chapter 4: Eliot

Nate stared at Parker. "Seriously? We try to frame Hayton for selling the dagger, and it turns out he's been running the Mona Lisa variant, peddling fakes all across Europe?"

"It makes sense, in a weird way." offered Hardison from his chair. "Hayton needed to keep the real thing for himself...authentication experts got their hands on it every time it went to a new museum on its world tour. Gladstone was double-dipping. This guy—what? Quadruple, quintuple-dipping?"

"But it's a terrible plan," protested Nate. "Why wasn't he exposed by irate customers? I'm surprised he wasn't swarmed by hit-men."

"He succeeded, mon cher, because I was right. You should listen to me more often." With that opening salvo, Sophie walked down the stairs to join the team. In sharp contrast to the rest of the group, all of whom were dressed for weekend lounging, she now wore a black pencil skirt, stockings, a shimmery blue-gray silk blouse, and full make-up. To Nate's dismay, she was still speaking with a French accent.

He watched her carefully as she sauntered toward the briefing table. As she took the seat next to him, she seemed to invade his personal space more than necessary. However, once the scent of her light perfume hit him, old memories of Paris burst into his conscious memory, and the rightness of her accent clicked into place.

Hardison, Eliot, and Parker were regarding Sophie with differing degrees of apprehension. Parker clearly hoped for more pyrotechnics; she was smiling in anticipatory delight. Eliot's eyes were narrowed; he was probably comparing her behavior against various medical conditions. Hardison just wanted quiet. Nate wondered if Sophie's performance wasn't some sort of complex revenge for all the teasing she had endured last night. Well, he was one American who recognized the mastery behind Sophie's accents, even if it sometimes took him a while to correctly identify a particular one. He scrutinized her for one more beat and turned back to the team.

"Guys, I'd like you to meet Eugénie Marchand. Eugénie, the guys."

Sophie's response was coolly dismissive. "Nate, I know who they are."

He smiled at her. "Yes, you do. And they know who you are. But they don't know anything about you." She seemed amenable to that assessment, so Nate gave the team a brief summary.

"Eugénie—Dr. Marchand—is an art expert, just like Karen Ipcress. In fact, they are often professional references for one another." He arched an eyebrow at Sophie. "Isn't that convenient?" Sophie smiled politely at the jab and let him continue. Her only sign of discomfiture was the light tapping of her fingertips on the table.

"Eugénie tends to work for museums and galleries in Europe, while her counterpart Karen appears when there's an opening in the U.S. or Canada."

"So why's she here?" Eliot asked, breaking in with the question that Nate was avoiding. Sophie looked offended.

"You asked for me, remember?" she answered. "You needed my expertise to create a credible story. And I was right, yes? Hayton sold the dagger to Georgios in the spring."

Eliot nodded in reluctant agreement, but Sophie wasn't finished. She smiled slowly and edged closer to Nate. Looking the mastermind directly in the eye, she added, "Also, Monsieur Ford does not like Karen. He much prefers Eugénie."

Nate was helpless in the face of such a bold attack, especially since she spoke the absolute truth. He flushed and broke eye-contact. Satisfied, Sophie sat back in her chair with an impish smirk. The team watched this exchange with barely-controlled mirth. Parker looked like she was wishing for popcorn. As Nate desperately cast about for a way to get the group back on track, his glance snagged on Sophie's restless hands.

"Yes, well, I could do without the cigarettes." he noted dryly. Sophie self-consciously laced her fingers together and placed them in her lap. Before she could say anything more, Nate applied to Eliot for clarification.

"Georgios? As in Georgios Leva? He bought a fake?"

The hitter nodded. "I found out when I left Hardison and Parker doing their little arts and crafts project in the van and followed the thug." Eliot's disparagement of the improvements made to the souvenir dagger shook Hardison from his lethargy.

"Arts and crafts project?" he squawked indignantly. "I'll have you know my machine is the bleeding edge of rapid prototyping technology. Blee-ding! Those gems it made last night—" Eliot cut him off.

"Rapid? There was nothing rapid about it. I had to fight all three of Georgios' thugs so that they didn't get back to the gallery before Parker was out of there." Parker gazed at the Steri-stripped gash and the large purple bruise that decorated Eliot's forehead.

"The potatoes were supposed to slow them down," she said apologetically. Hardison was still defending his invention.

"No respect, man. Rapid is relative. It's like the difference between Gutenberg and monks calligraphying Bibles. When I think of all the ways we could use desktop printing during our jobs..." This time, it was Parker who interrupted.

"I thought you built it to make props for that on-line game you play," she said. Hardison was caught short.

"Well, yeah, but it's the principle of the thing." He hauled himself to his feet. Still mumbling, "No respect, just no respect," he went to the kitchen for more orange soda.

Eliot looked over at Nate. "Any of this ringing a bell, yet?"

Nate rubbed his chin and thought about the story that Parker, Hardison, and Eliot had recounted so far. He wished he knew where he and Sophie had been. Thankfully, his bruised skull had responded to the aspirin—pain was no longer his foremost thought—but his memory of the job remained nonexistent and his brain was having focus issues. The bristly scratch of his facial hair combined with his awareness of Sophie's put-together appearance reminded him that he surely looked like hell, too. He raised his eyes to meet Eliot's.

"No, sorry," he admitted. "There's nothing there."

"Ah!" exclaimed Sophie in sudden comprehension. "That is why we are doing this story-telling? I thought perhaps the job was not finished, that something went wrong." She peered closely at Nate, all traces of flirting gone from her expression.

"The potatoes in the kitchen?" she ventured. Nate could see that she was already sure of the answer. The grifter's eyes hardened and her mouth pursed in anger at the memory. "Your head hit the table very hard." Nate nodded, and was about to ask Eliot about following Georgios' man, when Sophie jabbed her index finger toward his face.

"It's your own damn fault, you know!" she hissed. The rational art historian was gone, and Viola had taken her place. "Instead of a night out, you drag me to visit some homeless friend of yours. No food. Nothing to drink but black coffee. It was a lousy date! If those potatoes hadn't hit you, I would have hit you myself!" With one last shake of her finger, she shoved her chair violently backwards and stalked away from the table to the couch. She sat, crossing her arms and her legs, and she shot lethal glares at the team, as if daring anyone to approach. No one dared. Hardison claimed her vacated seat at the table.

"She's ba-ack," he sang softly, taking care that the furious woman across the room didn't overhear. With his new bottle of soda, Hardison looked prepared to dive back into the story. However, the hacker had no sooner sat down than Parker hopped up and darted away. Seconds later, the microwave started. Nate sighed. She was making popcorn. At this rate, he was never going to shake a full account out of his crew.

Even so, Sophie's latest outburst had given him an idea: maybe Viola emerged when Sophie was upset. The idea didn't help him with the origin of her personality merry-go-round—he could only hope that the underlying cause would materialize in someone's narrative of last night. Suppressing a feeling of helplessness, he filed away his hypothesis for when Eugénie, or—please, God!—Sophie, surfaced. If she could get herself reasonable again, he would try to keep her calm.

Eliot had watched Sophie stomp away with a dispassionate expression on his face. Noting that she was now relatively settled, he picked up his chair and moved it around to the other side of the briefing table so that it was directly across from the mastermind. The hitter sat, placed his hands on the table top, and leaned forward. "Alright, Nate," he said. "Let's get this done. The sooner we get to the end, the sooner we can figure out what's going on with Sophie."

Nate agreed. Parker was still in the kitchen—the sounds of popping corn were just barely getting started—but that was fine. She had stayed behind in the van when Eliot followed the thug. She shouldn't have any facts to add to this portion of the tale, right?

"Where did the guy go after he grabbed the souvenir away from Parker?" Nate started. "And how did you catch up to him?"

"The real cleaning crew was loading their vans and locking down doors around that time. He ran away from Parker, but he had to slow down to make a quiet exit." answered Eliot. "I left the North Wing as soon as I figured out Parker might be in trouble." He shrugged. "By the time the guy skidded into the atrium, I was already there." Nate and Hardison were listening carefully.

"So where'd he go?" asked Hardison. "Up to Mass Ave?"

"No. I wish," said Eliot, grimacing. "He went across the fens to hell."

"Dude, the only thing in that direction is Fenway Park," scoffed Hardison. "I admit the fens are sketchy at night, but what's so scary about the Green Monster—it's just a wall painted green."

"_Dude_," Eliot snarked back, "it was Friday night. Every college student in the world was on Lansdowne St, either drunk or tryin' to be. And the Sox lost, so that's 30,000 more people looking for a beer or a fight or both. It was ugly."

"That's odd," said Nate. "The game crowd should've cleared out long before you got over there."

Eliot shook his head. "I don't know. They lost by double-digits, and to Toronto, too," he added with scorn. "Maybe folks were extra-mad. I don't care. What I care about is that it was a pain in the ass to follow the guy to his rendezvous point."

"Who'd he meet with?"

"Just those two fake guards from the museum, no new players," said Eliot. "But it confirmed our suspicion that they were working together."

"It did explain the knife in the air-vent." agreed Hardison. He reached for his soda, and then stopped, setting the bottle back down. Inexplicably, the hacker was grinning ear to ear, and trying not to laugh.

"What's so funny?" asked Nate. This was the most animation he'd witnessed from Hardison all day.

"The part he's not telling you," said the younger man. If anything, his smile grew wider. "Last night, I didn't know where Eliot went, I just knew it was loud. Figured he was in a packed bar and didn't think anything more of it."

"Hardison," Eliot growled. "It's not important to the story."

"Oh, but sharing it is important to my day," Hardison retorted. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a smart phone. He quickly scrolled through a list of files and when he found the one he wanted, he looked up at the hitter.

"Like I said, I thought Eliot was in a bar. But it took you a while to get into the bar, didn't it? That was crowded street noise at first."

Hardison was milking this situation—whatever it was—for all it was worth. Nate decided to step in before Eliot resorted to justified violence. The hitter's whole body was tensed in irritation. At minimum, Hardison's phone was in danger of blunt force trauma.

"Come on, we don't have all day," the mastermind urged. "Explain or move on."

"He got recognized. Well, kind of. And then two girls fought over him," snickered the hacker. "Were they as hot as they sounded?" he asked Eliot.

"Three girls." Eliot corrected grudgingly. "And they were as drunk as they sounded." He rolled his eyes and turned back to Nate. "They weren't fighting over me, they were fighting about me. But not about _me_, me. It was who they thought...uh, they...I...forget it." Eliot's descent into incoherence was the opening Hardison was waiting for. The hacker placed his phone flat on the table and pressed Play.

For a couple of seconds, all they heard was jumbled crowd sounds emanating from the phone's speakers. Feet scuffed at the pavement, hundreds of conversations melded into a steady roar, and impatient drivers pounded on car horns. Nate leaned closer to the phone—it was difficult to hear over the sharp pops coming from the kitchen. An instant later, however, he sat back again. A shrill, female squeal issued forth, and the girl's words more than held their own against the competing sounds of last night's crowds and today's popping kernels.

"OH, MY GOD! You're that ball-player..." Next, Eliot's voice—a rushed denial. But the girl wasn't so easily deterred.

"NO! I saw you play. It was wicked amazing! That home-run, back when we thought we were losing the team? Emmy, you know, he's THAT player!" Nate imagined the speaker turning to a friend next to her for support. He supposed the girl was from Palmerston. What were the odds? A different female voice chimed in at top volume.

"REALLY? ARE YOU KIDDING ME? THAT'S JOHNNY DAMON? HOLY CRAP!" Obviously, Emmy was not as much of a baseball fan as the Palmerston girl. Or else she'd had much more to drink.

"No, you twit! Johnny Damon doesn't have long hair anymore. The Yankees made him cut it all off!" That must be the third girl Eliot mentioned. Her voice sounded similar to the first girl's, but maybe it was the phone. Like Hardison, Nate would have assumed two girls.

"Don't call me a twit, you know-it-all bitch!" Emmy howled. They heard a screech of pain and more screaming. From just an audio file, Nate and Hardison had no idea who had done what to whom.

Eliot explained. "That Emmy chick just pulled the third girl's hair, and the third girl knocked her flat. The first girl was still tryin' to get my—well, Roy Chappell's—autograph but she had to go break up the fight." He turned to Hardison. "Are we done now?"

This time, the hacker acquiesced. He was still chuckling, but he shut down the audio file and pocketed his phone. "Roy Chappell and now Johnny Damon. Can't take you anywhere, man!"

"How'd you get waylaid by the college kids?" asked Nate.

"It was the janitors' uniform," sighed Eliot. "I couldn't get close enough to Georgios' men to listen if I was dressed exactly like one of 'em." The hitter seemed supremely annoyed at fate as he remembered the scene. "Before I went into the bar, I ducked into an alley to get rid of the uniform. That's when the girls spotted me. They were with a large group, leaving some club through the back door. And, well, you heard the rest."

"So what'd you do?"

"Stuffed the uniform into a dumpster and stole a hat off one of their boyfriends," Eliot said with a shrug. "Punk was enjoying the cat-fight, filming it with his iPhone instead of makin' himself useful." Parker re-joined them, plunking a large bowl of popcorn on the table. The smell of butter was strong. She dragged a chair to Eliot's side of the table, and sat across from Hardison.

"You stole his Red Sox hat off his head and he didn't notice?" she clarified. "Nice!" She helped herself to a handful of popcorn. "So then what, you eavesdropped on the bad guys?"

"Yeah," said Eliot. "They were fighting when I finally got in there. They had figured out the dagger was a fake-"

"Not exactly rocket science," interjected the hacker. He turned to Nate. "Forget how light it was. The souvenirs all have bright green 'Made in China' stickers on the blades. Any moron would know as soon as they removed the toy dagger from its scabbard." Nate chuffed in amusement as he imagined the goons discovering the label.

"Well, these particular morons disagreed on their next move." Eliot took some popcorn and looked over at Hardison. "Do you have any useful recordings on that phone, or are you just making your own personal gag reel?" he asked. Hardison shook his head.

"Doubtful, man," he said. "I'll play the clip, but it's not like those guys were squealing over baseball players. Their conversation mostly blended into the background noise of the bar." He selected a file and reached around the popcorn to lay the phone back on the table. Nate, Eliot, and Parker all leaned forward. Through tinny speakers, the pub sounded like it was underwater. Glassware clinked, clothing rustled. Actual words or phrases came through only sporadically.

"...possible, I tell you..." "NO! WHAT?" "...Papelbon'll get it done..." "...we don't get the money..." "...all I'm saying, is..." "...frickin' Bluejays..." "...extra innings..." "...won't wake up..." "...bastard tomorrow..." The clip ended, and Hardison retrieved his phone.

"See?" he queried. "Useless. There's one more audio file from the bar before Eliot told us that they were heading back our way, but there's no point in playing it. It sounds the same as this one." He nodded at the hitter. "Care to translate?"

"Their orders were to go after the dagger and, if anyone else got to the dagger first, to kill Hayton," said Eliot. "Once they knew their dagger was a fake, one of the IRA guys wanted to take care of Hayton and blow town immediately."

"Well, why didn't they?" asked Nate.

"Parker's little friend. Seems without the dagger, his life was expendable," answered Eliot. The hitter looked vastly pleased at this idea. "He was desperate to get the dagger, so he was pitching different scenarios, all of which required a return trip to the museum."

While Eliot elaborated on the goons' discussion, Parker's eyes were following movement in the kitchen. Nate looked over his shoulder to see what was distracting her. Sophie had left the couch and was puttering around. He couldn't tell what the grifter was doing, exactly, but he took comfort in the fact that she hadn't pulled out the vodka bottle this time. He returned his attention to Eliot's narration.

"His first idea was based on their own knife-in-the-vent trick. He suggested that Parker had hidden the real dagger someplace inside the museum."

"That's dumb," said Parker. "If I had done that, they left me plenty of time to go back and get it."

Some of Eliot's hair had come unbound as it dried, and he impatiently brushed a lock away from his face.

"Desperate, remember, Parker?" he said. "Plus, there was a bonus tied to the dagger. That's really how he got the second IRA guy to side with him. Their only chance at the extra money was to retrieve the dagger. Knife-guy convinced them that they could look at the security footage—see if it had actually left the museum, see who had taken it." The hitter paused for a moment and then added, "They also argued over who Parker might be working for...Becker's name came up, couple of others."

"As if I'd take a job from that loudmouth scum," Parker protested around a mouthful of popcorn.

"So they walked back to the museum?" asked Nate, heading her off. Parker answered, quickly forgetting her pique.

"No. One of the guys was hungry," she said. "Eliot warned us over comms that we needed to have the new fake ready in the time it took to eat wings and curry fries." Hardison picked up the tale.

"Which was almost, but not enough, time for us to finish," he said. "Even factoring in extra minutes for ordering the food, and the trek back over."

"Which was why I booby-trapped the museum's kitchen with the potatoes," finished Parker. Nate looked back and forth between the hacker and the thief. Was it his bruised head, or did their tag-team explanation not make much sense?

"And how, exactly, was a booby-trapped kitchen supposed to buy time?" he inquired.

"I was told to control the goon's re-entry and stall," insisted Parker, "so I rigged the potatoes to land on anyone passing from the kitchen into the museum. And I left the kitchen lights on and its exterior door propped. For anyone approaching the museum complex from the west, it was the easiest, most visible way to get back inside."

"Was the new fake ready by this point?"

"Hardison brought me the fake dagger just as I was finishing up in the kitchen," said the thief. "He went back out to the van and Eliot and I went into the museum. I triggered the potatoes behind us."

"We had to give Parker enough time to make the switch and disappear," said Eliot. "Hardison monitored the cameras, and I waited for them."

"But...?" prompted Nate. "What went wrong?"

"The fake guards had real keys," grumbled Eliot. "They ignored the kitchen and went in through a stairwell door between the parking garage and the atrium. There's a security kiosk near there; they wanted to run the tapes."

"For us, the security footage was the simple part," said Hardison. "I mean, I could keep them from seeing Parker in the gallery picking the lock, no problem. But up until that point, nothing had happened to the real dagger all night, so it didn't take them long to fast-forward through everything."

"And Parker hadn't made the switch yet?" asked Nate.

"I had problems with the display mount," said Parker. "We made the souvenir heavier by putting lead on the handle and inside the scabbard. It changed the balance, and the little plastic mounts in the case weren't enough. I had to open another case and borrow some more."

"Which explains why Eliot had to stall Georgios' men," the mastermind stated.

"Now that, we have on tape," said Hardison happily, "You've got to see this, especially the first bit. Eliot scared the crap out of them." The hacker rose and re-activated the wall-mounted screens. Nate was intrigued. Eliot Spencer was a formidable fighter; the hitter scared most opponents. What was so special about scaring these three?

Hardison had his smart phone out again, and his laptop was perched on the back of the upholstered chair. He fiddled with both devices for a minute, frowned at his phone, and then swapped it for the small remote. He looked back at Nate. "I can't sync the audio from Eliot's earbud with the security footage—well, I can, but not quickly. If I played it now, it'd be like a badly-dubbed martial arts flick. But you don't really need the sound. Watch..." He clicked the remote.

On screen, the man wearing the cleaning-crew uniform hustled down a museum corridor accompanied by the two fighters wearing guard uniforms. The group neared a wall of glass to their left; Nate recognized the gift-shop hallway. As the thugs passed the shop, the glass gave way to a long, low wall, about three feet high. In the dim light, it was impossible to see what lay on the other side of the wall. Nate thought he remembered it to be an activities area—large and open, with scattered tables and bins of art supplies. When he had last been there in person, the wall dividing the workspace from the hallway had been decorated by scores of children's drawings. He hadn't lingered. Hardison's voice pulled Nate from this memory.

"Wait for it," Hardison prompted, eyes on the screen. He smoothly switched security cameras, so that the team was viewing the trio from the front.

Out of nowhere, Eliot's form appeared in front of the approaching thugs. Even on the security footage, it looked spooky. Nate knew that the hitter must have been lurking in the open activities space, but on tape, Eliot was a ghost. A very solid, very menacing ghost. The fake guards froze, their faces a mixture of shock and pure terror. The third man scuttled 10 feet backwards before pausing.

"Man, did you actually say 'Boo?'" Hardison asked Eliot. Eliot's mouth twitched in amusement.

"Yeah, I think I did. Worked, though," he answered.

"See, this is why I wanted sound," explained the hacker. Parker and Eliot nodded in understanding, but the mastermind was still in the dark.

"Why?" asked Nate.

"Two things happened next," said Eliot. "The fake guards remembered that they were armed, and Sophie screamed your name over comms."


	5. Sophie

Title: Rashomon Redux

Author: Peripatetical

Rating: T

Summary: The morning after the night before. Four mostly-reliable narrators, three hang-overs, two head traumas, and the Dagger of Aqu'abi.

Spoilers: Season Three

Disclaimer: Not mine. I'm just taking the Leverage crew out for some cheap fun. I'll get them back to Electric Entertainment and TNT in the morning.

Author's Note: I apologize for the delay. By the time I edited the first four chapters, the details described in the last two no longer matched. Anyway, hooray for the promise of Season 5! :-D I want to meet Hardison's Nana.

Chapter 5: Sophie

Nate, Hardison, Parker and Eliot watched the fight unfold on screen. Just as Eliot had said, the two fake guards recovered from their shock and drew their guns. Unfortunately for them, they were much too close. Like a striking snake, Eliot wrenched the gun away from the goon on the right, simultaneously shoving the man bodily into his partner on the left. The second goon's aim was pushed wide, giving Eliot time to bring his knee up in a brutal blow to the gut of the man he'd just disarmed. As the man dropped to the floor, Eliot snapped the gun away from the second fighter.

Keeping his eyes on both thugs, Eliot took two steps backwards into the entry-way to the activities area. He efficiently removed the clips from the guns and tossed the pieces backwards into the darkness. The third man watched warily from his position down the hallway. Even without sound, Nate could identify the exact second that Sophie yelled. The footage showed Eliot preparing to use the break in the low wall to force the thugs to confront him one at a time. Suddenly, an expression of surprise crossed the hitter's face; his chin lifted and his right hand made a quick, unconscious move toward his ear.

The fighter who was still on his feet took immediate advantage of Eliot's break in concentration. Moving past his partner, he lunged at the hitter. Eliot blocked the fist aimed at his ribs, but absorbed much of the impact—Nate was reminded that Eliot's job was to stall these guys, not to lay them out. While Eliot grappled with the goon in the entryway, the other fighter made it to his feet. He scrambled over the wall and attacked Eliot from behind with a punch to the kidneys and then a kick to the knee. The hitter side-stepped the kick, yanking the attacker in front of him further into the activities room. At the top edge of the screen, Nate noticed Parker's opponent stealthily climbing over the wall and fading into the dim space beyond.

Eliot and the two fighters had moved far enough into the large room that it was difficult to see the conflict except when one or more of the combatants neared the hallway. At one point, one of the thugs fell backwards against the dividing wall. His arms flailed as he dug for balance, and then he stumbled forward toward the fray and out of sight. Eliot had ditched the stolen Red Sox cap; Nate had some success tracking the location of the hitter through flashes of light glinting off of the hitter's glasses. A chair crashed sideways into the hallway, suggesting that furniture was being turned into weapons. And then, following in the chair's path, what the hell?

"A tennis racquet?" asked the mastermind incredulously.

"There was all sorts of sports equipment back there—boxing gloves, lacrosse sticks," Eliot explained. "Related to some museum exhibit, I think, but it looked like a kids' camp."

Just as he said that, the largest of the thugs re-appeared clearly on screen, backing slowly into the hall. As Eliot advanced after him, the other fighter closed in behind Eliot. A movement off to the right caught Nate's attention. Squinting into the dimness, he realized that Georgios' thief was tossing something to the man at Eliot's back. The mastermind winced as he identified the weapon as a cricket bat.

The team watched silently as the inevitable neared. Eliot slammed into the man in the hallway and flipped him to the floor. The man stayed there, clutching his elbow, as Eliot spun to confront the second fighter. Armed with the bat, the other man's attack was already in motion, and the hitter went down. Hard. Nate thought guiltily that he was glad they couldn't hear the smack of the bat against Eliot's forehead. The security footage showed Georgios' fighter discard the bat and roughly haul his partner to his feet—further wrenching the injured arm, Nate was pleased to note. The third man stepped over the wall into the hallway, and all three headed for the gallery. Eliot stayed motionless on the floor.

"Why did the third guy hang back so much?" asked Hardison curiously. "He could've come at you with the bat himself at any time." Eliot turned around in his chair so that his back was to the screens and he was again facing Hardison and Nate. He reached for more popcorn.

"Because Parker broke his wrist," said the hitter proudly. "He was whining about it in the bar—didn't shut up 'til his friends told him that with no dagger, his wrist wouldn't be the only thing broken."

Parker had turned back to the popcorn as well. Nate was about to ask her what she had done with the real dagger, when he realized he smelled smoke, and that it was coming from the kitchen. He whipped his head around in time to see Sophie ineffectively slapping at the toaster with an oven mitt. Eliot was moving quickly around the table, but the thief reacted the fastest.

Before Eliot reached the kitchen—indeed, before Nate even made it to his feet—Parker was standing on the kitchen counter, stretching above the cabinets to the fire alarm. She deftly removed the battery. The alarm issued a warbling squeak in protest, but otherwise remained silent. Looking down at the surprised expressions of Nate and Hardison, she shrugged.

"I thought you'd want to hear her story next, and the alarm is louder than the tea-kettle," the young woman explained. "Besides, Sophie's fine. It's just toast."

It didn't smell like just toast. And should he be worried that Parker knew how loud the smoke alarm was? Nate approached the kitchen to investigate. Eliot had convinced Sophie to step aside; the hitter had the appliance unplugged and was dealing with the smoldering contents. From the counter, Nate saw why the smoke was strangely acrid: a bag containing bagels had been leaning against the toaster and the plastic had melted wherever it touched metal. Lovely.

Nate looked over at Sophie. Her arms were crossed, one foot was tapping, and she was staring malevolently at the toaster. Calm, Nate reminded himself. If he was going to hear her description of last night, he needed to keep her calm. He rounded the counter and poured two cups of coffee. One, he set aside for himself. He added milk to the other; he hoped Sophie's alter-egos liked their alcohol-free coffee prepared the same way she did. He kept his own coffee black. He didn't dare go near the liquor cabinet. Stepping carefully around Eliot, who was shaking charred crumbs out of the toaster, Nate offered the fresh coffee to Sophie.

"Would you like me to make you something to eat?" he asked her.

The grifter accepted the coffee. She sipped it as she studied him with suspicion. Her foot had stopped tapping, and he was grateful that she wasn't yelling at him anymore, but something was obviously still wrong. As Nate waited for her response, he examined her pupils. They were of equal size—that was good. Were they dilated slightly, or was it his imagination? He wondered how he could check her head for injury. Eugénie might let him, if he manufactured a decent excuse. Viola would take his hand off. Deciding not to risk it, he returned to the offer of food.

"Well?" he asked, giving her a verbal nudge.

"Scrambled eggs?" she suggested. Her voice still sounded like Viola, but for a split second, her eyes were wide and guileless. Nate devoutly hoped he was glimpsing Sophie starting to break through.

"I can do eggs," he agreed mildly. "Here, have a seat." He ushered her to the counter. Parker had retrieved her popcorn bowl, and was perched on the end stool already. Hardison was next to her, and the two observed Sophie with interest. Nate checked the egg supply as he pondered ways to convince Sophie to describe the job from her perspective. If only he had his own version to tell; he suspected that every single one of her identities would relish contradicting his memory of events. Could she be convinced that that they needed her input in order to do something? But to do what? That was the sticking point. Find the car? Before he could test this angle, Parker dove in and took the decision away.

The blond thief frequently responded to the world with child-like wonder and confusion, and her need for coaching in social situations often led Nate to treat her as if she were younger than her years. But every so often, he was reminded that Parker was a grown woman, and that she could be completely diabolical. This was one of those times. While Nate was rummaging for ingredients and utensils, Parker leaned toward Sophie, her eyes sparkling.

"So...tell us about your date," she invited.

"Yeah," said Hardison, immediately jumping on board. "It doesn't sound like it went so well. What did he promise? Dinner? Dancing?"

Sophie appeared gratified by their attention. No surprise there, Nate thought—all of her characters enjoyed an audience. The grifter tossed a glare in Nate's direction and he quashed an uneasy feeling that she had read his mind. Logically, she didn't need to read his thoughts to find a reason to glare—this persona was plenty mad at him already. When Nate met her glare with a bland, vaguely inquiring expression and refused to squirm, Sophie gave in. She leaned on her elbows, holding her coffee in both hands, and answered Hardison.

"He promised to take me to see the Dagger of Aqu'abi," she said. "At the museum. Now that's a classy date, right?" She waited for affirmation from Parker and Hardison before continuing. "Did you know that the last time the dagger was here in Boston, they put a fake out on display? Imagine! Everything in the museum could be fake. I mean, how would we know? What a scam!" She looked simultaneously affronted and admiring. "I really wanted to see the real deal. I love rubies..."

Sophie gazed dreamily into her coffee, and Nate started to saute onions and mushrooms. The mixture had just begun to sizzle when he was distracted by metallic banging. The mastermind cocked his head in an attempt to see around Parker to whatever the heck Eliot was doing. The man had been trying to scrape the melted plastic from the toaster, but as Nate watched, Eliot gave up. With a growl of disgust, he shoved the appliance—cord and all—into the stainless-steel trash can. Letting the lid snap closed, he crossed his arms and leaned back against the exposed-brick wall of the condo.

"So what happened?" the hitter asked Sophie. "Did you two go see the dagger?" Nate turned down the heat beneath the pan in order to hear Sophie's response.

"No!" she exclaimed. "He said we had to stop and see a friend of his first."

"Wait, we drove somewhere?" Nate asked, surprised. Springing into the conversation without thinking was a bad call. His question—or the reminder of his presence—only seemed to rile Sophie.

"Of course we didn't drive anywhere," she snapped. "It's not like your friend lives in a nice house and invited us over for drinks. Annoying little man." Her voice rose in pitch. "It was bad enough that you paid no attention to me on the walk over...on your cell phone, texting away, taking calls. And then, when we got there! Pretending we weren't even on a date at all!" Sophie was on a roll. She set her coffee down, and it looked like she was going to start jabbing her finger at Nate again.

Nate refrained from asking if the 'annoying little man' was him or his friend. He made a show of backing down and returning his attention to food preparation. Once Nate was whisking eggs and milk, Hardison stepped back in.

"What did Nate's friend have to do with the dagger?" The question successfully diverted Sophie's attention. She sipped some more coffee and considered the question before answering.

"I thought maybe he was a reporter," she said finally. "We went to his office. He had newspaper clippings everywhere. Nate called me his _associate—_" Sophie's voice was pure scorn, "_—_and then Nate tried to sell him a cockamamie story about the dagger being stolen again by its new owner to cover up fraud. Again! What a pack of lies. And if it was true, then why did he promise to take me to see the real dagger? Huh? Huh? Answer me that." Pleased with her logic, she looked at each team member in turn. When the others offered no response, she straightened her shoulders and smiled in triumph. Her eyes slid sideways to Nate for a second, and she leaned across the counter toward Parker and Hardison, as if sharing a secret. "That's when we learned about the other theft attempts."

The thief and the hacker looked suitably impressed. Nate wondered if they were humoring her along, or if the crumbs of truth in her narrative were true revelations. Nate caught Eliot's eye and motioned at Sophie. Fortunately, Eliot took the hint.

"Where was this guy's office?" he asked. "And why'd you say he was homeless?" Sophie looked annoyed at the change in direction, but she obliged.

"His office was in the basement of that block of buildings connected to the museum," she said, with a petulant sniff. "And he _was_ homeless—he obviously had no place to go. For Pete's sake, he was sleeping down there—he offered me a seat, and I had a choice between his desk chair and a folding cot!"

Nate paid just enough attention to the eggs to keep them from scorching, and thought about her story. There was a brick building connected to the original museum structure along the museum's north side, but it housed museum offices. Across the street was another brick building, but it was a dorm, and he didn't know any college students. Damn it, this job was going to need way, way more damage control than parking tickets.

"And his office smelled like old take-out." Sophie wasn't done complaining about Nate's friend. Nate dished up a portion of eggs and spooned mushrooms and onions on top. He slid the plate in front of Sophie.

"Here, try this," he urged. "You can tell us all about those other theft attempts." Sophie's eyes narrowed, but she accepted the fork and napkin he handed her. Hardison's eyes were on the eggs remaining in the frying pan.

"Hey, man, can I have some of that?" he asked. Nate looked down at the eggs.

"Uh, yeah, sure," he agreed. He moved to the fridge to get ketchup, which was sure to be the next request. By the time he turned back, the kitchen was filled with the sounds of forks clinking against plates. Hardison had served himself, and Eliot, too. The hitter was now seated at the counter with a plate of eggs in front of him. Parker seemed to be sticking to popcorn, but the mastermind caught her filching a mushroom off of Hardison's plate. The hacker looked at Nate and his eyes lit up.

"Ketchup!" he exclaimed. "Thanks, man!" Wordlessly, Nate handed the bottle over. He checked the pans, even though he knew what he'd find. Scraped clean. Not even a stray mushroom left. He rolled his eyes and started loading the dishwasher. A quick survey of the kitchen didn't reveal much that was immediately edible. He wasn't going to touch the bagels in the half-melted bag. The fruit bowl contained a lone apple. It hardly seemed worth it. With a sigh, he topped off his coffee with milk and sat down with the team.

"Hardison, did you know about the other theft attempts?" he queried. The hacker looked up from his plate.

"Yeah, well, not until after." Hardison took another bite of eggs. Gesturing with his fork, he said, "The eggs are good, man, but you know what would really go well with them?" Nate scowled.

"Do not say potatoes," the mastermind retorted. The younger man just smiled and kept eating. Nate stayed on topic. "What do you mean, you knew _after_?"

"Once we knew Hayton was dirty, I looked deeper into his financials. I had some time while my machine was making the gems," Hardison explained. Eliot snorted, but refrained from commenting further on the slowness of the process. Hardison ignored him.

"Turns out, Hayton's been embezzling from Baron Oil for years. Cozy little set-up. But then the oil spill happened—all of a sudden, every aspect of the company was under scrutiny," The hacker laughed to himself and poured more soda into his mug. "That's when the idiot started selling fake daggers. He needed money, and fast. He used the payments to try to cover his tracks—his most recent tracks, anyway."

Orange soda and ketchup. Nate shuddered. Maybe he wasn't so hungry. The mastermind idly wondered if the organic ingredients in the ketchup that Eliot made them buy somehow neutralized the artificial colorings and flavorings in the soda. Ah, the metabolism of youth. He sneaked a sideways peek at Sophie. She was quiet, steadily eating her eggs. At least she hadn't objected when he sat down next to her—that was progress.

"Tell me about the exhibition time-line," Nate requested.

"The dagger first went on display in Japan last year," said Hardison. "Then Moscow, then Kiev. It went to Germany for a while, then Baron Oil threw a splashy party in London. No news reports, not even an internet rumor about anybody trying to steal from those venues. And honestly, there wasn't much security on it in Moscow or London."

"London would've been a cake-walk," agreed Parker, her eyes gleaming. "At the party, the dagger was outdoors, and the champagne was flowing freely." She snagged another mushroom. Hardison had created a little mountain of mushrooms off to one side of his plate for her. Nate reflected that he should have put something obnoxiously healthy—like broccoli or spinach—into the eggs. Maybe then he would have gotten to eat some. Parker had managed to distract herself; she was staring into space, happily imagining all that could be stolen at a party full of drunken VIPs, so the hacker finished the time-line.

"Anyway, the oil spill happened in April, when the dagger was still in London—they moved it to a gallery after the party," said Hardison. "It went to France next—another champagne reception, followed by several weeks in a museum in Paris. Then a month in Barcelona, a month in Madrid, and then the dagger came to Boston. It's scheduled to go to New York on Wednesday."

"And the theft attempts?" Nate asked. "Why wasn't there more press?"

"General incompetence on the part of the thieves," supplied Parker, promptly coming out of her daydream in order to deliver a professional assessment. After a moment, she relented a little. "They did have some bad luck in France," she added charitably. Nate looked to Hardison for a translation.

"There were robbery attempts in Paris, Barcelona, and Madrid," said the hacker. "But they all failed and it was never clear that the dagger was the intended target. In Paris, the dagger's visit overlapped with a trove of stuff from an archeological site in Jerusalem. That exhibit traveled with its own security, and when the Israeli guards caught a couple of thieves, nobody gave a thought to the dagger."

"Tell him about the body-guards," Eliot interjected.

"Oh, yeah, I forgot about that," said Hardison. "When Hayton got to the States, he hired additional personal security. Now he _said_ it was protection against oil-spill protesters..."

"He didn't hire guards with riot experience, he hired guys who normally work for nervous politicians worried about assassination," said Eliot gruffly. "He's expecting a personal attack."

"As he should, considering his buyers," said Sophie. She laid her fork down and dabbed her lips with a napkin. All eyes swung to her—the French accent was back. Nate congratulated himself on the success of his food ploy. Now to keep her talking and on an even keel.

"What about his buyers?" he asked her.

"We did not know about the robberies when I chose Georgios. Your plan was to convince authorities that Hayton sold the Dagger of Aqu'abi in secret," she recounted. "But Hayton is a business man, he knows nothing of the art world or the black market. More importantly, he is not known in that world. You understand? He could only sell to the more reckless buyers, and our story had to explain why such a transaction produced not a whisper. Reckless, wealthy men are not discreet. Georgios was the only possibility." Nate considered her words. Georgios was a millionaire—possibly a billionaire, in dollars, depending on the exchange rate—and a gambler. He was rumored to have a very exclusive art collection tucked away in his compound in Greece, but the man spent most of the year on his yacht.

"How could you be sure that he was anywhere near Hayton this spring?" Nate asked.

"He likes the movies," said the grifter with an satisfied smirk. "In May, he was in Cannes. It is easy to imagine that Hayton used the party in Paris to sell the dagger."

"It went on exhibit at de Cluny after the party?" Nate questioned, double-checking his assumption. Paris had hundreds of museums and galleries.

"Yes, of course," Sophie answered. She smiled at him, her brown eyes shining with shared secrets, and immediately he was transported back, what—7, 8 years? He recalled his shock when he arrived at the Musée National du Moyen Âge for a quick consult on medieval church treasures only to discover Sophie on staff, masquerading as Dr. Marchand. What began as a two-day trip to Paris for I.Y.S. turned into a two-week game of cat and mouse. Nate remembered that she had been shocked to see him, too, but he was no longer so sure that he was the cat in that long-ago episode.

"That was the one problem with your story," the grifter continued. Nate's thoughts were tugged back to the present. "If Hayton sold the real dagger at the party, then de Cluny put a fake on display." She tossed her head. "Such a thing would not happen if I still worked there."

"Their tapestries are safer without you, though," Nate answered in amusement. "OK, so our fabricated story got the buyer correct, but not the transaction?"

"Yes. Georgios fit our story because he would stay quiet about a new acquisition. We did not hear about Hayton's real activities for the same reason," she said. "I dismissed other possible buyers because they talk too much. Martin Becker, for example. He is careless enough to buy from Hayton, but he is also a braggart. If he purchased such a treasure, he could not resist showing it off. The whole world would know." She waved her hand for dramatic emphasis. "And then there is Stepan Denisovich." She pronounced it _Stye-pahn_, the Russian intonation effortless. "He likes to sell things for profit."

"Hayton sold a fake dagger to Stepan Denisovich?" exclaimed Nate. "Volkov's kid?" He raked a hand through his hair, momentarily flabbergasted at the CEO's stupidity. "Now I understand the new body-guards on payroll." The last time he had encountered Stepan Denisovich Volkov, the kid was a European party boy who liked to be seen at glittering social events. Nate thought he remembered him later playing at real-estate in Miami. But the kid's father, Denis Petrovich Volkov, made his money in the Siberian natural gas fields, and the elder Volkov was a very dangerous man. If young Stepan realized that Hayton had cheated him, he was more likely to send daddy's thugs than stage a robbery.

"Yes, Volkov," confirmed Sophie. "He has no real expertise, but he has the money to buy anything that catches his eye. To re-sell the dagger, he would need to advertise. We heard nothing, and assumed that the silence was more proof that there was no real sale. But instead, he was quiet because he purchased a fake and wished to conceal his mistake."

"So you think Georgios and Becker were behind the failed thefts in Europe?" Nate asked. She nodded.

"The timing is correct, and Volkov would begin with retribution, not theft," she said, corroborating Nate's assessment of the Russian. "I think Georgios was the first sale. He was probably responsible for the Paris robbery. After failing, he would step back for a small while. I suspect Becker tried in Spain, but I cannot prove it."

"So what happened last night?" Nate asked. He had lost count of how many times he had voiced this particular question today.

"You dragged me to consult with your friend," Sophie answered. "Well, you dragged _Karen_," the grifter amended with a pout, "and we learned about the pattern of robbery attempts. We heard nothing from the others." Sophie flicked her hand to indicate the team. She had clearly gotten to parts of the story that no one had heard, because Eliot, Hardison, and Parker were no longer feigning interest—they were a rapt audience. "You were worried about the silence. So, we convinced your friend that we should all go check on the dagger." Hardison looked confused at this last bit.

"You never showed up on the security footage in the gallery," he objected.

"We did not make it that far," explained Sophie. "We went through a basement corridor and up through the cafe kitchen." At the mention of the kitchen, she shot a significant look at Nate. "In the basement along the way, we passed the security control room, but it was completely empty."

"Yeah, what did happen to all the real guards?" asked Parker.

"Oh, we found them," said Sophie. "Tied up and sleeping. They were locked in the basement storage closet."

"The museum really should consider putting security cameras in that closet," mused Hardison. He had finished his eggs, and Parker had taken care of the mushrooms. He pushed his empty plate aside in favor of his mug of soda. "So what'd you do?"

"When we got upstairs to the kitchen, our communication returned. We heard fighting. Then, Parker told Eliot that she was clear and that he could let them through, but of course, we did not know who 'they' were," said Sophie. "Nate's friend believed we were checking on the dagger. But after hearing Parker, we had to stay in the kitchen until we knew more." Sophie sighed. Nate thought she was sounding more like herself. This was the first time she had referred to any of the younger team members by name.

"So, what—Nate blocked the door to keep his friend from running out into the museum, and the potatoes fell on him?" Eliot asked her.

Sophie spread her hands in helpless resignation. "Yes. Nate went to the door and looked out into the hallway. Potatoes rained down from the ceiling. He fell backwards and hit his head on the corner of a wooden table. I could not wake him up."

"That's when I got there, right?" asked Parker. Nate turned to Parker in surprise. He hadn't expected that Sophie's and Parker's narratives would intersect inside the museum. But now that the thief had mentioned it, he had a hazy memory of lying on the floor, with Sophie's worried face looking down at him. Sophie started to answer Parker, but Nate held up his hand to stop her.

"Wait," he said. "I think I remember this part." Nate stood and placed both hands on the counter. He stared downwards, trying to hold on to the wisps of memory. He remembered the hardness of the floor and pain, crashing pain that originated behind his ear but somehow radiated throughout his body. "I opened my eyes," he said slowly, "and you two were there." He looked left to Parker. "Were you poking me?"

"You wouldn't wake up," she said.

"Well, next time, please don't," he answered. He looked at Sophie. Last night, she had been Karen Ipcress, and sure enough, his mental picture of her face floating above him was accompanied by exhortations to wake up, mostly voiced in the high-pitched delivery of the art historian. He had never liked Sophie's Ipcress character. Even in his memory, her accent grated on his nerves. He remembered her yelling at Parker for the potatoes. But as she lectured, her hold on Dr. Ipcress faded in and out. Her voice kept losing the tentative, twittering tones of Karen in favor of Sophie's own voice. Her words were forceful, and laced with fear. He remembered being sorry that he was in too much pain to fully enjoy her chewing out Parker on his behalf. He shook his head in frustration.

"I don't even remember sitting up," he admitted, still facing Sophie. "There's nothing past you telling Parker—repeatedly—that she was bloody careless." He reached out and tapped the grifter lightly on the back of her hand. "You really need to stop breaking character when I get hurt," he admonished.

Reactions were instantaneous. Hardison dropped his face in his hands and Eliot muttered, "Idiot!" Sophie yanked her hand out from under Nate's and jerked to her feet.

"You asshole!" she cried. "You want to know what happened last night? You were out cold for eight minutes, Nate. EIGHT!" She was gearing up for a longer diatribe, but Parker broke in, completely disregarding Sophie's reversion to Viola's American drawl.

"And the first thing you did when you were back on your feet was to make me hand over the dagger," the thief complained. Her interruption redirected Sophie's fury.

"You wouldn't hand it over," she hissed at the younger woman. "I had to pry it out of your hands." Parker just shrugged. Nate suspected she didn't see a difference—no matter how it was phrased, the thief had lost possession of the dagger. Again.

"So what happened to it?" he asked, looking back and forth between the two women. Sophie threw up her hands in exasperation.

"We did exactly what you told us to do with it," she said. "We gave it away!"

Either her outburst was the last she was willing to contribute to the debrief, or else she couldn't resist using the words for a dramatic exit. She sent one last glare in Nate's direction and marched back to the sofa. With a flourish, the grifter touched the back of her hand to her forehead, lay back against the couch cushions, and closed her eyes. She seemed to melt into the upholstery.

The team stared at her. No detail in Sophie's narrative, whether delivered within Viola's complaints or Eugénie's logical summations explained the grifter's odd behavior. Nate realized that his head was throbbing again as he contemplated Sophie's pieces of last night's puzzle. He dragged his eyes away from the reclining grifter and went to the freezer. He had just wrapped a towel around a Ziploc bag of ice when the doorbell sounded.

Hardison and Eliot looked up at the interruption, but stayed resolutely on their stools. Sophie didn't even twitch in response to the buzzer. This left Nate and Parker to have a silent battle over who would answer the door. Nate gave in to the inevitable with a snort and headed toward the entrance—he knew Parker was far more likely to hide in the duct work than to open the door to an unknown threat, even a polite threat who used the doorbell. Positioning his new cold compress at the side of his head, he opened the door. As he stared at the man on the other side of the threshold, his spirits sank.

"Let the damage control begin," he muttered to himself.


	6. That Annoying Little Man

Title: Rashomon Redux

Author: Peripatetical

Rating: T

Summary: The morning after the night before. Four mostly-reliable narrators, three hang-overs, two head traumas, and the Dagger of Aqu'abi.

Spoilers: Season Three

Disclaimer: Not mine. I'm just taking the Leverage crew out for some cheap fun. I'll get them back to Electric Entertainment and TNT in the morning.

Author's Note: No comms in the museum basement is orange box, not ledger. I worked in a basement office across from Boston's MFA for a year, and we had no cell reception down there. Since Hardison's comms use cell towers, then Nate and Sophie would've been SOL.

Chapter 6: That Annoying Little Man

Nate could only stare at his visitor. Standing in the hallway, wearing a wrinkled suit that was surely yesterday's clothes and carrying an enormous platter of muffins, was museum head of security John Coswell. The enticing smell wafting up from the muffins suggested that they were fresh from the oven. The mastermind's stomach growled, jolting him to speech.

"Coswell?" Nate exclaimed. "What are you doing here?"

The shorter man blinked owlishly up at Nate. "Well, of course I just had to say thank you, Mr. Ford. When I told my wife how you saved my job, and for the second time, might I add, she wanted to express her gratitude as well. She makes excellent muffins—really everything she bakes is wonderful, you know—but today she made muffins and she sent me over with these. Here, try one."

Coswell proffered the muffins in Nate's direction as he prattled on.

"The blueberries are locally grown. She and I picked them together up in Tyngsboro just this summer..."

Coswell's words faded as he belatedly noticed the other people spread about the apartment. He looked back at Nate for an explanation, but surprise was still Nate's dominant facial expression. In fact, as Nate glanced around at his team, everyone's face showed varying degrees of shock. He made a quick revision to that assessment—everyone's face except Parker's...

Not only was the blond thief not gaping at Coswell like the rest, but she wasn't escaping into an air duct, either. At the first mention of muffins, she had materialized at Nate's elbow, and was currently smiling, reaching for the platter, and ushering the hesitant security chief into the apartment.

"These are marvelous!" she praised around mouthfuls of muffin. "Eliot, you have to get the recipe from Coswell's wife."

Parker placed the muffin platter on the countertop near Eliot and Hardison. Faster than anyone could quite follow her movements, she then popped two onto a small plate which she delivered to Sophie. The thief came to rest back in the kitchen. She perched on the counter with her legs swinging and helped herself to another muffin. Coswell seemed to decide that Parker was his best hope for information; his next words were directed at her.

"What's going on? These must be the friends that Mr. Ford told me about last night, and it's certainly convenient that he doesn't have to call you all in order to share the muffins, but why is everyone staring at me?" he asked. Nate wondered what exactly he had told Coswell about the team. He didn't seem to have told Eliot and Hardison about Coswell. And how the hell had he and Sophie explained Parker in the kitchen with the dagger? The thief was answering Coswell's questions.

"Head injury, hangover, hangover-but-he-won't-admit-it AND head injury..." She ran down the list, pointing at Nate, Hardison, and Eliot in turn. "We don't really know yet what's wrong with her," Parker finished, with a nod at Sophie's reclining figure. Coswell was instantly solicitous.

"Oh, dear. Oh, dear. Dr. Ipcress, what happened?"

To Nate's relief, being addressed as 'Dr. Ipcress' seemed to pull Sophie into character. She dipped her chin and her voice fluttered.

"You're so considerate, Mr. Coswell," she said. "It's nothing, really. The coffee in the basement security room was drugged and I drank some of it last night when I was trying to stay alert, that's all." With that revelation, she leaned back again and closed her eyes. Nate moved to her side.

"Soph," he whispered, "can you make a guess about what the drug was? Should we take you to the ER?"

Sophie opened her eyes, and smiled widely at Nate. The demure art historian was gone, damn it, and Viola was back. She reached up and patted his cheek, leaning forward just enough so that Nate had a clear view down her blouse to the black lace edging of her bra.

"Don't worry, cupcake," she drawled, "I'll be f-i-i-i-i-ne."

Still smiling, she ran her fingers down Nate's arm and clasped his hand. Tearing his gaze from her cleavage, Nate saw that Sophie's eyes were closed again, but since she had a firm grip on his hand, he figured he wasn't going anywhere. He sat awkwardly on the arm of the couch, and tried to act as if Sophie's detour into the drunken aggression of Viola D'Agostino was simply how Karen Ipcress reacted to drugged coffee. Her latest vacillations puzzled him. He could have sworn Sophie had been getting better.

"Don't worry, man," said Hardison from his stool at the kitchen counter. "It can't be anything too serious. She only slept a couple of hours before she woke up. And she's coherent." At Nate's raised eyebrow, the hacker backpedaled.

"Mostly. She's mostly coherent." Under his breath, Hardison continued, "Dude, she remembers more than you, Mr. I-get-taken-down-by-a-sack-of-potatoes...potatoes might as well've had 'Acme' written on them...I mean, potatoes?" Nate ignored the monologue.

"Just check on the guards, will you? She can't have been the only one to drink that coffee. It's probably how Georgios' men managed the odds."

"Yeah, yeah, boss. I'm on it." Hardison left the kitchen, taking a couple of muffins with him, and headed for his laptop. He sat in the upholstered chair and started tapping rapidly, simultaneously checking the screen of his smartphone. After a minute or so, he paused and faced the security head. Coswell was standing by the briefing table, looking lost.

"Hey, uh, Mr. Coswell?" Hardison asked. "Could you tell me where your guards were taken for treatment?" Coswell seemed thrilled to have information that might help Dr. Ipcress.

"Oh yes!" he assured the hacker. "I made sure they all got checked out. Almost every one of them went over to BU Medical Center. Well, not Jamie—he wanted to go to Mass General. His wife's a nurse there, you know." An expression of worry crossed Coswell's face.

"I really hope Jamie doesn't quit over this. It's the second time he's been locked in that closet. When he heard the dagger was going on display, he asked for some vacation time. I wouldn't let him go, because I wanted all hands on deck, and now look. Oh, dear." With that, Coswell's attention returned to Hardison. The hacker had stopped listening at the first mention of a hospital and was focused on his device screens.

"Excuse me, young man," Coswell ventured, "but haven't we met before?" Hardison's eyes widened.

"Uh, no sir, I wouldn't think so," he answered. He looked to Eliot and Parker for help. Eliot just smiled at him, enjoying the predicament. Parker's assistance was worse.

"Maybe you've seen him at Second Fridays," she said. "We go a lot. They always serve the best little quiches and shrimp puffs." When she used Second Fridays as an excuse, Hardison had started to relax, but her mention of the hors d'oeuvres froze him in place.

"You shouldn't have said _shrimp_," Eliot muttered to Parker.

"Why not?" protested the thief. "Sophie says to stick to the truth when—" Eliot gritted his teeth and tried to stop her from going any further.

"Not when the truth can get you into more trouble," he insisted.

Neither of them were speaking as quietly as they intended, and Coswell was watching the squabbling pair like a spectator at a tennis match. Nate hurried to salvage the situation. He estimated that Parker was one reprimand away from appealing to Sophie. And if the grifter were asked to reiterate her advice on successful lying techniques, only God knew what would come out of her mouth.

"Mr. Coswell, won't you please have a seat?" he announced loudly over the bickering. He motioned at the chairs by the briefing table with his ice-pack. "We appreciate the muffins. And it looks like you've had a very busy morning. Perhaps you could give us an update? We've been, um—preoccupied—so far today." As Nate hoped, Coswell's gaze left Parker and Eliot and returned to Sophie.

"Completely understandable, Mr. Ford. You all have more important worries today. But everything is already on the news." He sat at the briefing table and gestured at the mounted flat-screens. "Do these get TV? Channel 6 repeats its newscast every 30 minutes." Without looking up from his laptop, Hardison aimed the remote and Channel 6 appeared.

The hacker kept typing, but everyone else watched expectantly as the weather report ended. Next came sports. A cheerfully optimistic young newscaster shared his predictions for Saturday and Sunday Red Sox wins over Toronto after last night's drubbing. As he launched into an analysis of the pitching rotation, though, the occupants of Leverage HQ started to fidget. Thankfully, as soon as his report ended, footage of the sports desk was replaced by the image of Janet Lin with a microphone standing in front of a Boston high-rise.

"Just last night, we brought you an interview with Nigel Hayton, CEO of Baron Oil," she said. "I'm standing in front of the hotel where he has been staying. Yesterday, the interview focused on his loan of the Dagger of Aqu'abi to the Boston Museum of Art & Antiquities. Today, Mr. Hayton was arrested for fraud after police apparently foiled an attempt on his life. Here is the scene from this morning."

The screen switched to footage of a handcuffed Hayton being led away from the high-rise entrance toward a waiting police car. Police officers were shoving the two museum guard imposters into another cruiser.

Then, Janet Lin was back, describing Hayton's pattern of selling fakes and assuring Boston residents that the dagger on display was genuine. Parker had other concerns.

"What about knife-guy?" she asked. "Did he get away?"

"Of course not," said Hardison. The hacker set down his laptop and turned in the chair to face the kitchen. "We cloned his phone, remember? The police already picked him up. They received an anonymous tip complete with GPS coordinates. Imagine that." He smiled at her, and she grinned back.

Nate didn't want to give Coswell any inkling of the extent of his memory loss, but he figured the cell phone sleight-of-hand must have occurred while he and Sophie were down in the basement and off comms.

"Yes, exactly when did you get the phone?" he asked the team. Eliot fielded the question.

"Parker lifted it when he took the fake dagger from her," he said. "Hardison cloned it, and I made sure he 'found' it in the museum hallway when the thugs came back for the second attempt." Coswell looked impressed.

"That was quick thinking, young lady," he complimented Parker. The thief looked delighted.

"Thanks! Being a consultant is a much more hands-on job than you might think!" she said. Well, Nate thought, that answered his question about how he and Sophie had explained Parker. Today, Coswell had almost recognized Hardison; last night, he surely would have recognized the blonde who had once punched him. They really needed to get Coswell out of there. Eliot was still discussing the news report, though.

"Why did they say he was arrested for fraud and not for embezzling?" the hitter asked the security head.

"That was Mr. Ford's idea," explained Coswell. "I spoke with a Baron Oil representative early this morning. They agreed to the deal." He turned to Nate, expecting the mastermind to be pleased with this result.

"Why don't you go ahead and explain, since you have the, uh, latest news," Nate said. He struggled to keep his expression impassive as he faced Coswell. By now, the whole team was laughing at his attempt to disguise the hole in his memory, and it was difficult not to glare at them. Hardison wasn't even trying to hide his smirk. Next to Nate on the couch, Sophie's shoulders were shaking. She relinquished his hand in order to cover her twitching lips, but her eyes betrayed her mirth. He re-positioned the ice against his head and studied her with suspicion, but her gaze remained fixed on Coswell. The security chief was only too happy to relay the tale.

"Certainly," he said. "As you expected, Baron Oil did not want the world to know that their CEO had been stealing money. Thanks to the oil-spill, their press is abysmal already." Coswell turned to Eliot. "I merely presented them with the financial information that Mr. Ford gave me. The company took possession of the dagger in lieu of repayment with the understanding that Hayton would get arrested anyway for the fraud. Boston Police handed him over to international authorities almost immediately. And I agreed to stay quiet about the embezzlement, as long as Baron Oil turned the dagger exhibitions into an international fundraiser for ocean clean-up." He smiled. "The fundraiser will begin with a sizable donation from the company, of course."

Eliot nodded to Coswell, thanking him for the explanation. Parker was grumbling at the hitter's side.

"Baron Oil doesn't need the real thing to raise money," she complained.

"Hey, now," objected Hardison. "I never even got to see it." Nate rolled his eyes. It was past time to get Coswell out of there. He stood and walked to the briefing table.

"Again, Mr. Coswell, thank you for dropping by. You've had a long night, and I'm sure you're anxious to get home to your wife. Please thank her for the muffins, and pass on our compliments." Nate crowded Coswell, giving the man little choice but to stand up and move toward the door.

"Oh, it was no trouble, Mr. Ford," assured Coswell. "I hope Dr. Ipcress feels better soon." He looked past Nate to Sophie, who had trailed the mastermind from the couch. "I do wish you'd accept our dinner invitation, Dr. Ipcress. My wife and I would love to have you and Mr. Ford over." Sophie looked trapped and was at an uncharacteristic loss for words. Nate jumped in.

"I'm afraid that will be impossible, Coswell," he said regretfully. "You see, Dr. Ipcress is only visiting. Tomorrow, ah, she flies back to –" The mastermind paused just a little too long, and the whole team rushed to fill in the blank.

"L.A.!" "Chicago!" "Atlanta!" Looking bemused at the cacophony of cities, Sophie recovered her powers of speech.

"I travel a lot for work," she offered, Karen Ipcress coming to the fore. "These days, I'm based on the west coast. Mr. Ford asked me to consult because he knows I am familiar with the dagger's history, but I go home tomorrow." She batted her eyelashes at the security head and reached out and touched his forearm. Nate repressed another eye-roll. "Thank you for the gracious invitation. I'm sorry I will not get to meet your charming wife," the grifter finished with a sincere smile. Coswell was mesmerized.

"Safe travels, then," he said. "And please call us if your work brings you back to Boston. My wife and I love dinner parties." Nate continued to herd Coswell to the door. The security head was cooperating, but he still had things to say.

"It was nice meeting all of you," he shouted around Nate's shoulder. "Thanks again for your help."

"We're just glad it worked out," said Nate. He gave Coswell a friendly clap on the shoulder, and used the move to propel the man across the threshold and into the hallway. "Now go get some sleep—you deserve it. You were the one who found the trail of attempted thefts, after all. I'm sure your wife has a nice lunch waiting." Coswell was still uttering expressions of thanks as Nate closed the door in his face.

Nate leaned back against the closed door and rubbed his eyes. He lifted the ice to the goose-egg behind his ear and surveyed the team. Eliot and Parker were still next to the dwindling pile of muffins. Sophie had taken Coswell's recently-vacated seat at the briefing table, and Hardison was sitting sideways on an arm of the upholstered chair. When Nate heard the ding of the elevator, he finally spoke.

"So tell me how Boston PD was so fortunate to find Georgios' men and Hayton all at once," he said. Parker was eager to explain.

"Ooh, that was fun!" she said. "You know we had taken the phone...well, we just called them up and told them that their second dagger was a fake. The ex-IRA guys went straight for Hayton!" Nate turned to Hardison.

"How'd you convince them? I thought your homemade gems were almost perfect. And I'm sure you removed the 'Made in China' sticker from the second toy." Hardison grinned.

"My gems do look almost perfect," he boasted. "Even Dr. Marchand says so. It's because I've tweaked the selective laser sintering process. As the ceramic powder is fused, I can control the index of refraction and the color of the gem being fabricated." Eliot had had enough.

"English, dude, not manufacturing-geek!" the hitter snarled.

"What? I'm answering the man's question," protested Hardison. "The point is, you can't tell from looking. But hardness is another story—can't fool Mohs. The finished products are softer than quartz—I just told them to test the gems with a steel file."

"How come the fighters didn't take out Parker's friend before going after Hayton, then?" asked Eliot.

"Oh, because knife-guy was the one I gave the details to," said the hacker. "I watched him on GPS and monitored his calls when we got back here. He put quite a lot of distance between himself and the other two goons before sharing the bad news. When he stopped moving, I gave the police his coordinates and tipped them off about Hayton."

Satisfied with the explanation, Nate pushed himself away from the door and went straight for the muffins. He picked up a second one as soon as he bit into the first. They were still slightly warm and they truly were delicious. He decided that he agreed with Parker. Eliot didn't seem to bake much, but surely these were worth an exception.

"What did you find out from BU Medical Center?" he asked the hacker, after he had finished the first muffin. Hardison shrugged, and turned to Sophie.

"Do you feel slightly dizzy?" he asked her.

"A little," she agreed. "It was worse earlier." Nate coughed to hide a laugh. Her accent was—finally—English, but her timing reinforced his suspicion that she had prolonged the affliction for her own entertainment. Still, he was profoundly relieved. He bit into his second muffin and raised his eyebrows at Hardison. The younger man expanded on his findings.

"They don't know what the drug was, but they've sent all of the guards home by now. Mass General ordered a full blood work-up on that one guy—no results yet. The notes from BU Medical Center say that the men were all highly suggestible and talkative, but their vitals were fine, and the effects seemed to be wearing off rapidly," Hardison summarized. He sounded amused, though, so Nate expected there was more to it.

"Yes?" the mastermind prompted. "But...?"

"Well," said Hardison, "They did keep one guy a little longer for observation at BUMC—apparently he was belligerent and threw a punch at the attending."

"Let me guess," said Eliot, "that guard was drinking before his shift."

"Got it in one!" congratulated Hardison. He grinned at Sophie. "Did you stick to Nate's whiskey last night, or did you make it to tequila?" The grifter made a face at him, but refused to comment.

"All right," said Eliot, "is that everything, Nate? I got stuff to do." Nate was washing down his third muffin with coffee. He nodded.

"Yeah, thanks. Be back Monday morning—we've finally found a guy close to Moreau." Eliot looked wary for an instant, but answered calmly.

"See you Monday, then," He opened the door, but paused before passing through it. He turned back to Hardison. "If you want all of us to go bowling, count me in. But real bowling—not on your Wii and not that stupid-ass New England candle pin thing." Hardison looked at the hitter in surprise.

"Not that I'm questioning your team spirit, or anything, but yeah, I'm questioning your team spirit," he said. "Why are you all gung-ho about bowling?" Eliot laughed.

"Dude, I want to see you get Sophie into those shoes!" he said. With that, he was out the door. They could hear him still chuckling in the hallway. Sophie looked down her nose at the hacker.

"I refuse to put shoes on my feet that hundreds of other people have already worn," she declared.

"I'll go bowling," said Parker. "I like the shoes. They're slip-slidey!" Nate watched as Hardison started packing up his various electronic devices. When the young man was done, he made eye-contact with the mastermind.

"Nate, I e-mailed you the name and number for the doctor who saw the museum guards," he said, "but I really don't think you'll need to use it."

"Thanks," said Nate. "Get some sleep before Monday—Moreau's dangerous."

Hardison nodded and moved toward the door. Parker hopped off her stool and followed him. She started peppering him with questions about what else his prototyping machine could make. Nate suspected that her pockets were filled with muffins. There were a lot fewer on the platter than there had been a moment ago.

The two were almost out of the apartment—Hardison was trying to explain that his machine couldn't make realistic money—when something electronic started beeping. Sophie, Nate, and Parker all checked their phones, but the warning was coming from Hardison's cell. The hacker glanced at the screen and looked up at Nate. His face was apologetic.

"This just isn't your day, man," he said. "You know we brought you back in the van last night, right?" Nate nodded. He had surmised as much. "Well," said Hardison, "your car's getting towed." The hacker tugged on Parker's arm, and with a slam of the door, they were gone.


	7. Epilogue

Title: Rashomon Redux

Author: Peripatetical

Rating: T

Summary: The morning after the night before. Four mostly-reliable narrators, three hang-overs, two head traumas, and the Dagger of Aqu'abi.

Spoilers: Season Three

Disclaimer: Not mine. I'm just taking the Leverage crew out for some cheap fun. I'll get them back to Electric Entertainment and TNT in the morning.

Author's Note: Because at the end of the day, I will always ship Nate/Sophie. Thanks for sticking with this story. I hope you enjoyed the ride.

Chapter 7: Epilogue

Once Hardison and Parker were gone, the apartment was eerily silent. Nate leaned against the kitchen counter and stared at Sophie. She remained in her chair at the briefing table and stared back.

"So," said Nate, "when did you realize that you had been drugged?" Sophie's eyes danced.

"Wouldn't you like to know?" Her accent was French. Nate laughed in appreciation and tossed his Ziploc bag of melted ice toward the sink.

"Yes, I would," he answered. "Do you want me to guess?" The grifter raised her eyebrows at him in a wordless challenge.

"I'll have to think about it," he lied. "In the meantime, it looks like Leverage Consulting & Associates is having a sick day. Would you like to stay and watch a movie?"

"Hardison told us what's in your Netflix queue," she warned him. "Really, Nate—_Sex and the City_?" Nate savored her return to her normal speaking voice.

"What? You like shoes," he parried. When she didn't respond, he relented. "It's fun to mess with Hardison's head. You know that. C'mon...go change into weekend clothes. I promise we'll find a movie that you'll like." Sophie scrutinized him for a few seconds, and then stood up. She was partway up the spiral staircase when she looked back over her shoulder.

"I'm not sitting through a Rockford marathon, either," she declared emphatically. Nate simply raised his coffee cup in a salute and watched her continue up the stairs. Yes, Sophie Devereaux was back. He always enjoyed the way she punctuated an exit with one final glance, like an exclamation point.

While he was waiting for her to come back downstairs, he wandered around the apartment, putting things to rights. He threw away the bagels, loaded plates and mugs into the dishwasher, and wiped down the counter with his discarded tea towels. He pushed Hardison's chair out of the briefing area and dragged the couch over so that it faced the flat-screens. Lastly, he went hunting for all of the muffin wrappers that the team had left scattered everywhere. If he wound up with mice, he was definitely going to bill his landlord for the extermination costs. When he was satisfied that the muffin wrappers were taken care of, he headed for the downstairs bathroom. He needed a shave.

When Nate returned, he found a much more casually dressed Sophie in the kitchen putting water on to boil. She favored his smooth-shaven face with an appreciative look.

"Feel better?" she inquired.

"Getting there," he answered. He stepped past her and retrieved two clean mugs from the cabinets. To reach them, he had to stretch toward the very back of the shelf. Guess he needed to actually run the dishwasher, not just toss things in. He handed one of the mugs to Sophie and poured new coffee into the other for himself. After adding whiskey, he sat at the kitchen counter and watched the grifter go about making a fresh pot of tea.

Sophie looked relaxed. The tailored skirt and dressy blouse were gone, replaced by gray leggings and a soft, long-sleeved pullover that was several shades darker than the leggings. Around her neck, he spied the gold necklace she had taken to wearing recently. The oblong pendant dipped beneath the pullover's scooped neckline. She was barefoot, and while she had her back turned, he smiled at her brightly painted toes. He had invited her to stay because he was worried about the effects of the drug she had ingested last night, and she had agreed to stay because she was worried about his concussion, and he knew that she knew that he knew—that she knew?—and now his bruised head was getting dizzy, but it was still nice. Nice to sit here companionably, with no other team members about, and just be.

Sophie rinsed out the ceramic teapot. After drying it, she set the pot aside and placed the tin of loose tea next to it in readiness. She claimed the stool across from Nate as she waited for the water to boil. He watched her hands as she sat down, the way she used both hands to re-position the stool, the way her fingers tightened against the counter top for the briefest of moments. Perhaps the dizziness had not dissipated as much as she'd have him believe. She spoke, however, and he lifted his eyes to her face.

"Coswell doesn't live anywhere near here, does he?" she asked. "Please say he and his wife aren't going to start popping into McRory's at happy hour."

"And ambush us with dinner party invitations?" Nate joked. "No, we should be safe. He and his wife live well outside of the 128 loop. That's why he was camping out in his office."

"You remember?" Her dark eyes were hopeful.

"No," he admitted ruefully. "Apparently I looked him up before contacting him last night—the internet search page was still up on my phone. But since when is going to dinner with me so bad? Coswell's in love with his wife—I don't see the problem."

"Yes, he's completely besotted. Which is why he shouldn't spring dinner guests on her, but that's beside the point." Sophie plucked a muffin from the platter. Instead of eating it, though, she toyed with the wrapper. "The problem is that Coswell knows me as Dr. Ipcress. Nate Ford and Sophie Devereaux could go for dinner, entertain the Coswells with stories about European art museums—all carefully edited, of course."

"Of course," he agreed.

"And everything would be fine," she continued. "But if Nate Ford and Karen Ipcress went, we'd have to be professional colleagues, Mrs. Coswell would view me as an old flame of her husband's...it would be a bloody nightmare." Nate had absolutely no intention of ever being a dinner guest at the Coswells, either by himself or with Sophie in any of her incarnations. And if Coswell appeared in McRory's with the missus, he might possibly hide in the poker room until they left. Still, he was intrigued by Sophie's portrait of certain disaster.

"We survived Coswell's visit today—and you were drugged and I had no memory. What makes dinner so dire? We could just pretend to be dating." The smile she gave him was faintly pitying.

"And just how would we do that? You can't stand Karen," she answered. Nate snorted.

"Almost every time we play a married couple for a con, our characters can't stand each other," he argued. "People buy it." Sophie's expression told him that he had missed her meaning. He felt as if he were failing a pop quiz in Dating 101. Time to give honesty a shot.

"Aw, hell, Soph," he said, "you know Dr. Ipcress' voice annoys me. It reminds me of the beauty-school dropout in _Grease_." Instead of being offended, Sophie was amused.

"It's not the voice that bothers you, Nate, but what the voice represents," she said. Nate was pretty sure that he found the voice entirely annoying, but Sophie's face was no longer teasing, and why did he suddenly feel like he had issued an accidental dare? Sophie abandoned the blueberry muffin and left her seat, walking slowly around to his side of the counter. She began her explanation in Karen Ipcress' breathless accents.

"Dr. Ipcress is meant to fade into the background, to be ignored. She doesn't argue—she rarely even makes eye-contact." Sophie was not making eye-contact with him now. She was watching her right hand trail along the counter top, which compelled him to do the same. She stopped in front of him, just short of invading his personal space, and covered his hand with hers.

"It was my bad luck that Coswell liked the sweet, shy type," she said.

Nate looked up at her face. Karen Ipcress looked back, wide-eyed and slightly batty. He blinked, and when he looked again, the timid art historian had vanished. He watched, fascinated, as Sophie's expression became bold, almost predatory. She stepped forward and leaned in, and even though she wasn't touching him anywhere but on his hand, he could feel her heat along his entire body.

"You, Monsieur Ford, prefer strong women," she whispered in Eugénie's voice. Had she moved closer, Nate wondered, and if so, how? He remained trapped in place by her eyes, and then Viola's brash voice was laughing at him. "Even the drunk, crazy ones," she teased. Finally, Sophie switched to the voice he had spent all day hoping to hear. "Admit it," she coaxed, "fighting with Karen would make you feel like a bully."

Nate smiled and reached for her hip with his free hand. Had he actually thought earlier today that flirting with her during a con was a rush? Flirting with her alone, no job or team members in sight, was much, much better. He shifted his weight, preparing to stand, when the tea-kettle screamed.

Sophie jumped back about two feet, and wobbled, steadying herself with two hands on the counter. Nate reached across the stove top and lifted the kettle off its burner. The kettle stopped shrieking, but it continued to whistle, the sound punctuated by wheezy puffs of steam. He couldn't reach the controls from this side of the counter, so he held the kettle in the air until Sophie made it to the stove and turned it off. She relieved him of the kettle and set it down on a cold burner.

"Bloody hell," she breathed. "Does any one of your passports list a birthday coming up? You're getting a new tea-kettle." He watched her pour the boiling water over the tea leaves.

"I don't know," he said. "You'd have to ask Hardison. But now that you've got your tea, what movie would you like?" She could make fun of his taste in movies all she wanted, but he knew her weaknesses. "I've got Hitchcock..." he wheedled.

It took them only a few minutes to clear the kitchen and move tea, coffee, and a pile of muffins to the couch. Nate put a pot of leftover chicken soup on the stove over low heat for later. Sophie sat cross-legged at one end of the couch and began flipping through Netflix and On-Demand options. Nate settled in at the other end with a tablet computer. He was skimming a report from Hardison related to Monday's job when a question occurred to him.

"Soph, when you were picking targets last night, did you consider Moreau?" Sophie stopped scrolling and put down the remote. Nate was momentarily diverted by the list of movie choices that were paused on screen. He suppressed a smile. It looked like she was deciding between older and younger Cary Grant.

"I did," she answered cautiously. "Are you asking to know what details fit, or why I ultimately dismissed the idea?"

"Both, I think," he said. She turned to face him and shifted to make herself more comfortable against the arm of the couch. She sipped her tea, and her eyes drifted down and to the right as she organized her thoughts.

"First, the bits that might've worked," she said. "Moreau's interest in art is well-known. He began his criminal career trafficking in antiquities." She nodded at the tablet in Nate's lap. "Hardison's research shows that his organization still derives enormous profit from looted middle eastern treasures. And now that he has money, well...if a particular piece—say the Dagger of Aqu'abi—caught his fancy, he might risk buying from an unknown like Hayton. Through one or two intermediaries, of course." She stared down at her tea, lost in contemplation.

"And the bits that didn't work?" Nate prodded.

"Our first plan had Hayton selling the real dagger and putting a fake on display. In that scenario, the buyer committed no crime. Hayton's asking price was probably pocket change to someone like Moreau. If we named him as the buyer, we risked calling attention to ourselves without getting any closer to him or his accounts." Sophie lifted her eyes from her tea and looked directly at Nate.

"And once we knew Hayton had sold several fakes, then I knew we weren't dealing with Moreau. Hayton would've been dead before he left Europe." Nate nodded, accepting her reasoning.

"This guy, Keller," he said, "do you know him?" Sophie shook her head.

"Our paths never crossed," she said. "It makes me wonder what he did before taking over Moreau's smuggling interests."

"Well, it's always more convenient when the mark doesn't know your face," Nate responded, "but I wish we had more intel. The details Hardison sent are pretty sketchy." He powered down the tablet and placed it on the briefing table behind the couch, swapping it for a book and a change in topic. "So," he asked her, with a nod at the screens, "_Notorious_ or _North by Northwest_?"

She clicked the remote, and opening credits began to roll. Even before Hitchcock made his cameo as a businessman missing his bus, however, Nate was deep in thought, his book forgotten. He thought about Moreau's international web, and their new mark, the man who now ran the smuggling operations. He thought about choices, the way they piled up, one after another, until current dilemmas bore no resemblance to the situations which had spawned them. In hindsight, choices and consequences marched along in an inevitable chain. What were Moreau's mistakes? Where were the forgotten choices made along the way that the team could exploit?

Nate looked at Sophie. His eyes traced her profile and admired her open, unguarded posture. The grifter was completely caught up in the movie's spell. His own mistakes had trapped them in this job for the Italian. Now it was his responsibility to get the team free. He had until Monday to plan the next link in the chain.


End file.
